Well, Shake-speare, he's in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells,
Speaking to some French girl,
Who says she knows me well.
And I would send a message
To find out if she's talked,
But the post office has been stolen
And the mailbox is locked.

Later, I found out it was by the "genius," Bob Dylan. Didn't change my opinion. It's good folk verse but not what I'd call poetic genius.

My opponent flared up, needless to say. Not only have I always been contemptuous of his conspiracy theory, but now I was belittling a contemporary hero of his! We later got into over what "doggerel" is. I said the proper definition of it is "unmetrical rhyming poem," but poetry they don't like for Philistines. My Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has verse that is "loosely styled and irregular in measure . . . also: marked by triviality or inferiority." I simply chuck the last as subjective and therefore worthless as a definition. The intelligent definition of a word is always the one I try to use, not the dictionary, or the "people's," definition when, as is so often the case, it is not intelligent. (I sometimes go so far as to think that humankind is speciating into those who use words for maximally clear communication and blockheads (who are preyed on by a third strain who use words principally to swindle the blockheads).

COMMENTS

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