There exists a house h in New Orleans, for every poor boy p, they call h the Rising Sun, and h has been the ruin of p.I know it doesn't scan, but I can't help it. I've got this ear-worm of Mick Jagger singing the lyric above. I don't think The Stones ever did a cover of House of the Rising Sun, but I can hear it just as though they did.
I got into this state through an occupational hazard filtered through a perceptual problem. I'll be teaching a topic in logic next week called mixed quantifiers, the sort of thing that happens when you make a statement that some object of one type exists with the property that every object of some (possibly other) type has a property ... and so on. That's the occupational hazard. My perceptual problem is that whenever I hear a phrase like "mixed quantifiers" some auditory circuit runs a simulation of what the world might be like if it were really "Mick's quantifiers." So I can't safely hear phrases such as "mixed metaphors," "mixed company," or "mixed grill" without exploring a whole line of speculative alternative interpretations. Although I'm duty-bound to teach my students about mixed quantifiers, there will constantly be a voice at the back of my head wondering how all this fits in with Mick's quantifiers.
I mean, shouldn't I be asking my students to consider the difference between there being at least one instance of a house that has a terrible effect on every boy (or girl, depending on the version), and the situation where we switch the order?
For every poor boy p, there exists a house h in New Orleans, h is the ruin of p, and h is called the Rising Sun.With this reversed order, each poor boy finds their own particular Rising Sun to torment them, whereas in the first version they all end up tormented in the same place. Wouldn't the world be a better place if veteran blues musicians improvised on riffs that are part of their common culture, and switched the quantifiers around a bit? Surely this is what Trad. Anon. had in mind when he/she/they wrote:
With one foot on existence, the other foot on for all, I'm going back to New Orleans to wear that chain and ball.
2 comments:
Some of the lyrics in pop songs has some mixed quantifiers which gets quite fun when you switch them around. For example, Donovan's "Boy For Every Girl," has such gems as:
For every boy there is a girl. Switch them around. There is a girl for every boy. Must be some perfect dream girl.
Or else a *really* tired girl.
Generations ago The Birds (I think) did "Turn, turn, turn," which (in turn) came from the Bible: "For everything, there is a season." Pretty different from a season for everything, I guess.
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