[lit-ideas] Re: "The Day After Yesterday"
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 21:31:26 EST
In a message dated 1/31/2005 5:06:55 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
"I'm not sure what McCartney meant by 'Yesterday'. Literally, of course, we
_know_."
'We' may know but it isn't at all clear to me. Perhaps my problem is that I
am not at all clear what the word 'yesterday' _literally_ means. I know how
to use it in a variety of contexts but which one is the 'literal' one?
--- Thanks for the comments. I grant you that 'yesterday' _is_ a tricky
word, for trickier (far trickier) is _tomorrow_. Mind, in Arabic, and Spanish,
and, I think, German or English for that matter, you don't necessarily mean
"day". YesterDAY, on the other hand, _literally_ means 'day', and, I was
suggesting, only FIGURATIVELY may mean 'the past', as in McCartney's, "How I
long
for yesterday".
Note that "How I long for yesterday" is extra tricky in that
1. being an exclamation, it can well be answered in the negative: "I _don't_
long for yesterday".
2. One is suppose to _long_ for things in the future ("I long for a cruise
to Jamaica").
In most languages, 'yesterday' does not _necessarily_ refer to a _day_
(German, Italian, French).
Come to think of it, this makes the title of Miles's novel a slight
redundancy: "The DAY after yester DAY" -- a cacophony that is not present in
the
literal, 'the day after tomorrow'.
Cheers,
JL
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
