What memories! It dates from the end of the sixties: when we would dance on that stuff, we would figure out what "sweatshirt" meant. BTW:"tamporifying" is a Nate's neologism?
didjcripey, lol, yeah. There are a whole bunch of Bollywood videos with fake translations like that.
I like this one more though, since there isn't a real translation. It's not the first case like this. Lewis Carrol's famous poem 'Jabberwocky' is a great example of how sounds create emotion without actually needing words, with it's slithy toves and all. More recently, Cirque de Soliel has used fake language in their songs. It makes rhyming easy, but it also lets you pick the exact sound you want. Louie Louie might as well be made up words, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious- it's all in the same vein. :)
If you don't look at the dancing and ignore the beat it's almost like listening to Bob Dylan. There is a term called, 'Mondegreen' that is related to all this, that I stumbled on Googling about this video:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen
It can be fun to play with them in lyrics too.
In songs The top three mondegreens submitted regularly to mondegreen expert Jon Carroll are:
"Gladly the cross I'll bear" to "Gladly, the cross-eyed bear (From the line in the hymn "Keep Thou My Way" by Fanny Crosby)
Carroll and many others quote it as "Gladly the cross I'd bear".
"There's a bad moon on the rise" to "There's a bathroom on the right" (Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival)
"'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" to "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" (Purple Haze), by Jimi Hendrix: ).
And, like laurent said, there are neologisms too. Yeah, I screwed that one up. I wanted the slithy toves TOES to be tamporifying. I was sort of going for tapping and tamping (since something as big as a slithy tove would tamp by merely tapping, although, thinking more about it I think maybe toves are legless, and therefore toeless). Maybe I should have made it tempurafying, the process of making something into tempura.
My favorite personal neologism is full-less-ness, which I coined in a poem years ago to describe that state of yearning when you have some but want more. :)
edited to reformat my cut and paste from Wikipedia.
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Last Edited by on Jul 23, 2012 11:59 AM
I just wonder where he found a high A-flat harmonica in 1972? Besides the Hohner Vest Pocket, I'm not sure of any others... did Seydel have more of a presence back then?
@Todd If this was the early 70's, we were still locked into the Eastern Bloc disagreements--the Berlin Wall didn't open until the late 80's . . . So Seydel was firmly behind the Iron Curtain--and still on a starvation diet, I believe.
I have just been listening to Vera Hall's Troubles So Hard -- then this. Talk about sublime to ridiculous. Speaking of mondegreens, one of my friends used to think "Our lips are sealed" was "Sammy the Seal"
It is without a doubt a high Ab harp in 2nd position - double checked it when this thread was first posted, and just checked it again with my High Ab. I just wonder if there were any others available back then besides the Vest Pocket, which Charlie McCoy also used some in the 70's or 80's. I have no idea what else would have been available back then.
Of course, I guess he could have tuned up a high G. I did that recently with a Special 20 in high G, turning it into a high Ab.
The "mondegreens" principle is used quite a bit in American television to mask profanity.
For example, from the iconic "The Big Lebowski":
"Do you see what happens, Larry? Do you see what happens when you find a stranger in the alps? This is what happens, Larry! This is what happens when you feed a stoner scrambled eggs!" -- Walter Sobchak
