"I Made My Excuses And Left" lyrics - ellipsis?

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Tomas · #1 Post by **Tomas** » Sat 27 May 2006, 12:17 pm

I Made My Excuses And Left:

You were sitting close to him
Staring in each other's eyes

From one point of view, it might be understood like this:

You were sitting close to him
(and YOU [you, my ex-friend] were) staring in each other's eyes

- which obviously would be a nonsense (it would have to be "staring in his/her eyes"
then).

Of course the right version is:

(and YOU [both] were) staring in each other's eyes

It is a common way of poetical expression (ellipsis)? Or not, but "high" English still does allow to have one "you" to be used for both singular and plural in the very same sentence?

boyjohn · #2 Post by **boyjohn** » Sat 27 May 2006, 4:37 pm

I brought this up a few weeks ago when people were complaing about numb being bad english. I pointed out that technically this line in IMMEAL was not really grammatically correct either.

If you read it as a sentence, it says that "you" were staring in your own eyes also??!!

The "ellipsis" scenario usually would be that a word or phrase was left out and you have to mentally put it back in, but it's hard to figure out what the missing words would be while still keeping the words in the same order.

Oh, and back to the complaints about numb using the "wanna"'s, etc. When The Beatles were at #1 with "She Loves You", Paul McCartney was talking to his Dad, and his Dad said, "Paul, it's a great song, and I am so proud of you, but did you have to use that terrible Americanism "yeah". Couldn't you have wrote "She Loves You, YES YES YES"

So, these type of silly complaints have been going on for quite awhile.

Tomas · #3 Post by **Tomas** » Sat 27 May 2006, 4:55 pm

boyjohn wrote:The "ellipsis" scenario usually would be that a word or phrase was left out and you have to mentally put it back in, but it's hard to figure out what the missing words would be while still keeping the words in the same order.

Well, as I indicated above, I - as non-English speaker - would figure out (not that hardly really) that "You both were..." might most probably be the "thought-only" part in case of ellipsis scenario.