Lorem Ipsum

Sometime around my sophomore year at Swarthmore, a guest speaker came to give a linguistics talk. This guy had done a study of Mexican songs, and had discovered that they often mis-stress words—they take a word that normally has stress on the first syllable, for example, and put the stress on the second syllable instead.

I thought that was interesting, and afterward I went up to him and commented that I'd noticed the same thing in popular music in English. He said, "No, this doesn't happen in songs in English." I was flabbergasted—I said, "Sure it does, it happens all the time." He said, "Name one example." I got flustered, as I always do in such situations, and grabbed the first example of a weird rhythm that came to mind, even though I had a nagging feeling it wasn't quite right: "In Simon & Garfunkel's song 'A Poem on the Underground Wall,' there's the phrase 'A single word, only comprising four letters,' emphasized like 'ONlycom PRISing.'" He gave me a half-pitying look (poor dumb undergrad) and said, "That's the correct stress. 'comPRISing,' that's the way the word is stressed." He was right, of course, which flustered me more, and I muttered, "Well, there are lots of others" and escaped.

(That story is made even more embarrassing by the fact that I had misheard the S&G lyrics. The actual line is "A single-worded poem comprised of four letters," which makes the rhythm in the song much more natural.)

However! I was definitely right that a lot of popular songs do contain mis-stressed words. I come across them every so often and think smugly to myself that I was right. (In case you're wondering, no, I don't normally hold grudges for this long over something so tiny.)

I was reminded of this a couple days ago when "Walk Like an Egyptian" started running through my head and I realized that I still don't understand what half the words are. So I went and looked up the lyrics and found the following mis-stressed words:

• paintings: paintINGS
• bazaar: BAH-ZAHR
• money: moNEY
• waitresses: wait-ress-IS

Vindication! Now if only I knew who that linguist was.

Anyway, looking up the lyrics resulted in my uncovering a couple of Mondegreens. I always thought the schoolkids in that song "like to plunk in the middle bed." Kinda racy, no? Actually, they "like the punk and the metal band." And "the bud which resists" turns out to be "the blonde waitresses."

There are a couple of lines that are still very unclear to me, though. Different sets of online lyrics provide different answers. The line I'd heard as "slight faded street," for example: which of the following is it really?

• Line your feet astreet
• Hide your feet up the street
• Slide your feet upstreet

And finally, I'm particularly intrigued by the line before "So [or Go] strike a pose on a Cadillac." Which of the following is right?

• Life is hard you know
• Like Sergeant O

I'm guessing it's the former. But if it's the latter, who's Sergeant O? And why does he or she strike poses on Cadillacs?