(Note: This post was updated on May 27, 2015. As we’ve written before on the blog, lyric writers are exempt from the rules of grammar, syntax, usage, spelling, pronunciation, and even logic! In fact, we don’t generally get all hot and bothered about ungrammatical song lyrics. That’s why we don’t trust what we can’t actually see in published books or sheet music. The words found on Internet song-lyric sites are generally supplied by fans who merely post what they think they’re hearing.Īnd what they hear isn’t necessarily what the lyricist wrote. We’d like to put in a plea here for caution when critiquing song lyrics. McCartney ultimately thinks the phrase is “we’re living” (the version given in Pop Fiction), though he regards “live in” as “wronger but cuter.” “It’s kind of ambivalent, isn’t it?” he says as he waivers between whether the phrase is “we’re living” or “we live in.” “That kind of prepositional doubling is common enough in speech when people start to use one construction and switch into another, especially when the construction involved (as here) is a usage shibboleth.”Ĭarey also cites a July 30, 2009, Washington Post interview in which McCartney indicates that he’s unsure of the actual wording of the lyric: “Certainly it’s ungrammatical but it’s not unnatural,” Crystal says on his blog. The language commentator Stan Carey, writing on the Macmillan Dictionary Blog, argues that the phrase is indeed “live in,” and he cites a defense of the usage by the linguist David Crystal. (You know you did, you know you did, you know you did)īut if this ever-changing world in which we’re living When you were young and your heart was an open book, Here’s the entire stanza, as quoted in Pop Fiction: It was also recorded by McCartney’s band Wings and released as a single. The song was written by Paul and Linda McCartney for the James Bond movie Live and Let Die (1973). However, the phrase may be perfectly correct in the lyric as originally written, according to Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema (2005), edited by Steve Lannin and Matthew Caley. Some people even hear one more “in” there: “But IN this ever-changing world IN which we live IN”! Q: Here’s a non-grammatical lyric that will amuse you. In the recording of “Live and Let Die,” Paul McCartney sings: “But if this ever-changing world in which we live in.” Isn’t this a serious overdose of the “in” word?Ī: This lyric comes in for a lot of criticism from people who like complaining about ungrammatical songs. Barry from Sauquoit, Ny On April 16th 1973, Paul McCartney and Wings introduced the video 'Live and Let Die' on the ABC-TV special James Paul McCartney.
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