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Since that is my State Song and I've performed it a few times, I thought I was familiar with all the mis-heard lyrics, but there are some new ones in there. Although I suspect a few of them are simply attempts at humor.

The Eagles have been accused of being a little too precious for their own good in that song. The line about killing the Beast with steely knives in the Master's Chamber continues to defy interpretation, and may well be a joke played on the compulsively analytical audience of that intellectual era, without the wink at the end to let us in on the joke like the last line of "Stairway to Heaven." "Mercedes bends" is a cute pun in print but it just doesn't work when spoken aloud, much less sung. "Tiffany-twisted" might have been understood in Beverly Hills, La Jolla or Marin County in 1976, but in any other place and time it sure does sound like "definitely." We've all been trying to figure out what the "warm smell of colitas/calitas" is for 31 years and there simply is no such word for a plant or anything else in English. In Spanish colitas means "little tails," but if that's a slang word for something with a "warm" smell I've never tracked it down. One or more of the band members were originally from Texas, so perhaps the word means something there.

When the Baby Boomers grew up and their children became the song's audience, I changed "We haven't had that spirit here since 1969" to ". . . 1849", the Gold Rush Era, and started getting more nods of comprehension.

When the California hotel industry became the province of the Indian immigrant community in the 1980s, I started rapping the bridge with an Indian accent and got a lot of laughs for it. I found the Indians to be a gracious people who shared the laugh.

The song always gives me goose bumps because I came out to Los Angeles from a hick town in Arizona--precisely in the year 1960. Arizona is full of missions and I could see one (and absolutely nothing else but sand and cactus) from my bedroom window, but still, when the train door opened and I saw a real city and felt a sea breeze, it was like the scene in "The Wizard of Oz" when the world turned Technicolor. Nowhere did the 1960s unfold with such accuracy to the stereotype as in urban California. Hippies, motorcycles, pot, crash pads, intellectualism, pacifism, atheism, women's lib, the sexual revolution, compulsive racial mixing, surfing, and that weird blend of acid rock with folk music. And of course having a college education and a good job allowed me to experience all of that against a background of square meals, a clean place to sleep, reliable transportation and health insurance.

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Having "checked out" of California several years ago, forced to follow my money to Washington in order to get some of it back, and finding the place to be not just a different region, not just a foreign country, but an alien planet, I am constantly haunted by the closing line, "But you can never leave." I always have the band stop playing, the stage lights darkened, and I do that line a capella in what I hope comes out as an eerie stage whisper--like "those voices calling from far away" that I still hear every night.

Damn, I miss California!

 

Springsteen can be forgiven for his New Jersey accent, although it's not the stereotype with pronunciations like "Jizey." Englishman Chris Hamlett Thompson parroted the same mispronunciation when he sang the hit version of that song with Manfred Mann. You'd think a star would be able to acquire the ASCAP or BMI published lyrics to another star's song.

These days anybody can get practically any song from Lyrics.com or other internet sites.

So a deuce is a junkie. Is that what "Deuce Bigalow" was all about? I just assumed it was a play on nicknames like Ace Ventura, with the implication that a deuce is always lower than an ace.

BTW, the song with that lyric is "Blinded by the Light." "Spirits in the Night" was, I think, one of Manfred Mann's original songs.

 

Indeed, yesterday was the 50th anniversary of one of the happiest days in my life. It was my second year in high school and I was a math major. The Space Race was on and the U.S. was already losing to those nasty Rooskies. Overnight, it became cool to study science and math for your country. The jocks started treating us with respect, the pachucos stopped threatening to beat us up, and we got dates. Science and math majors were treated like normal human beings for about twenty years, until the Religious Redneck Retard Revival swung the pendulum all the way in the other direction and it became fashionable to know no science at all. By then of course I was a computer programmer making a fabulous salary so the girls liked me anyway. One of them even married me.

When I was at Caltech, a.k.a. Geek Heaven, in the 1960s, we held dances, which seemed like a strange idea since it was an all-boys school in those days. But girls from the nearby coed universities and the all-girl schools car-pooled over to hang with the future scientists and mathematicians. What a great era! Spasibo, Sputnik!

Yes, the Wikipedia article on "Deuce Coupe" (as opposed to "Little Deuce Coupe" which is a rather anemic article about the song) makes it clear that that was the slang term for a 1932 Ford coupe, starting in the 1940s when hot-rodding became popular. Ford was legendary for always building only a single model of automobile, and 1932 was the year they stopped production of the venerable Model A and launched a new car with a host of high-tech improvements. "Deuce" = "2" = "1932." That same article insists that in the Springsteen song it's a reference to a hot rod; a common theme in his songs going all the way back to "Born to Run." I was a motorcyclist in my youth so I don't know hot rod slang and I'm not quite sure how a Deuce Coupe would be "wrapped up," but I can see how it would be a "runner in the night." Maybe "wrapped up" is the same as "wound up," i.e. the engine speed raised to its maximum possible rpm?

Well yes you have certainly violated all the rules and now you'll have to go to Linguistic Purgatory to do penance. Familiarize yourself with the website Merriam-Webster.com; the free online dictionary with definitions and etymologies for a large basic vocabulary of words in American English.

Then come back tomorrow and tell us what the word means and where it came from.

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Hey, I recommended Merriam-Webster.com because it's free. OED.com is a subscription site which even my wife with her M.A. in English Literature has not deigned to include in the family budget. Do you think the average teenage member of SciForums is going to have access to it? The case in point was "moribund"; we're hardly going to encounter subtle differences of nuance between the British and American definitions of that word.

Besides, M-W does an acceptable job with your quaint Britishisms. (I suppose the proper coinage would be "Britannica," but that word has been co-opted as a trademark for a book which is now ironically published over here.) "Flashlight" is definition #4 under "torch," labled "chiefly British." If you know of a free online dictionary that is slanted toward British usage, please post the URL. I will certainly be happy to add it to my bookmarks.

Why are you asking this on the Linguistics board instead of Astronomy??? I'm a pretty indulgent Moderator when it comes to allowing discussions to veer off topic, so long as they have a vague connection, since this is not an easy subforum in which to maintain critical mass.

Still, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume I missed the OP that ties this into a discussion of language and answer the question for the Inquring Minds who Want To Know. Or perhaps you just want to verify the Former Future Scientist credentials I claim from my matriculation at CalTech nearly fifty years ago. Anyway, the answer is that the moon's orbit is not geosynchronous. If it were, it would appear in the same place in the sky every night (or day depending on your vantage). It would have no impact on tides and with only the sun's gravity pulling on the oceans the natural world might be substantially different from the one we live in.

To reestablish the relevance to this board: The Germanic word for "time" might not be "tide."

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