July 29, 2007

The culture of Zippy's world


Here and there with Zippy and Gertrude Stein.  And Zippy mondegreens Black Sabbath monstrously:




For those of you who haven't committed "Paranoid" to memory, here are the original lyrics for this verse:

Finished with my woman cause she couldn't help me with my mind
People think I'm insane because I am frowning all the time
All day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfy
Think I'll lose my mind if I don't find something to pacify

[Added 7/31/07: My posting originally had "browning" (from the lyrics website linked to above) rather than "frowning", but several correspondents pointed out that many other lyrics sites had "frowning" and that "frowning" made more sense.  Listening to (one) recording of the song -- on the "Reunion" CD (1998), a live performance by the original Black Sabbath members -- made it clear to me where "browning" came from: though it's hard to make out the words (this is, after all, heavy metal music), it sure SOUNDS like "browning".  Maybe the initial segment is just a voiced [v] rather than [f], and I'm interpreting that as [b] before [r].]

Zippy's version is considerably more, well, concrete.

zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu

Posted by Arnold Zwicky at July 29, 2007 02:20 PM