Skip to main content

If I ever meet Sir Paul McCartney

Many years ago one of the mobile phone companies had a series of ads were famous-ish people said who they would like to have a one-to-one with and why. Inevitably their choices veered to the pretentious (no prizes for guessing Martin Luther King was one of them).

Well, I'd like a one-to-one with Sir Paul McCartney. And what I'd like to ask is what was going through his mind when he allowed the phrase 'this world in which we live in,' into the theme song to the Bond movie Live and Let Die.

I mean, world in which we live in???

Every time I hear this, I want to cringe and simultaneously throw my shoes at the source of this illiterate guff. The really silly thing is that he could have left out either of those offending 'in's without spoiling the scansion, just by extending a word to a second note. So either 'wor-ld which we live in' or 'world in which we li-ive.' But no.

So come, on Sir Paul. What's your excuse?

Comments

  1. I'm so pleased you mentioned it, Brian, because I hate it too. Every time I hear it, I feel like I have an itch that wants scratching.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's like you say, Brian. He's an illiterate guff. But, oh, how he made my heart quiver when I was a kid. He was my favorite Beatle, so he could have mixed metaphors and sung with a plethora of adverbs, and this young kid would have forgiven him for every one of those literary travesties. Swoooon...

    ReplyDelete
  3. I was a Beatles fan in my youth too - though purely because of the music, I hasten to add. But it's not enough to forgive the irritation this causes every time I hear it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...