[lit-ideas] The poet johnny in question
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- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:19:39 +0100
On 18-Dec-09, at 1:08 PM, Donal McEvoy wrote:
--- On Fri, 18/12/09, cblists@xxxxxxxx <cblists@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Upon checking, I see that I've misquoted that poet johnny;
the fragment goes:
I grow old ... I grow old ...
Dum da dum da diddly
Ta da diddly dum ...
In Tommy's version, which may pre- or post-date "johnny"'s, he
whinges on about rolling his trousers or something. This is without
checking.
'Tommy' (i.e., T.S. Eliot) was indeed the 'poet johnny' I had in mind.
(The phrase is borrowed from Wodehouse; 'johnny' is not a name but a
generic term for, as The Oxford American Dictionary that came with the
other software pre-installed on my MacBook puts it, 'an unknown man'.
The dictionary gives the example: "the security johnny insists that
you sign the visitors' book".)
My original phrasing:
I grow old, I grow old,
Ta dum ta dum diddly dum ...
was based on my misremembering the lines as:
I grow old, I grow old
I shall wear my trousers rolled ...
On checking, I found that the relevant fragment actually runs:
I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
This the necessity for the extra 'diddly's, etc. in my 'Erratum'
posting in order for the 'quotation' to scan properly.
Chris Bruce,
diddling only in the intransitive sense, in
Kiel, Germany
P.S.: The full poem can be found in many places online; I am quoting
from
http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
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