Robin, that’s why I put dictionary in quotes.
On your main point, yes, some songs are diminished without their musical accompaniment, some aren’t, though. That’s all I’m saying.
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Robin Hamilton wrote:
David:
I don't know about Jamie, but rewording your, 'the lyrics of a song are without any “poetical” qualities,' into something which makes more sense to me, that's virtually what I am saying.
To put it another way, aural compositions with music -- I'm wording it this way to avoid problems of ambiguity and value judgement and a whole mess of other things which cluster around certain words, and not just in the dictionaries -- note the plural -- where the music is an integral part of the work, are diminished when the music is removed and the words are considered by themselves. What's left may be "poetical", as you say at the end of your post, but there's an at best diminution and at worst a maiming of what should be an imaginative whole.
Jamie has already said this, better than I can and in more detail, so I'm damned if I'm going to do whatever it is with the usual cliche.
I could say more, especially (since I spent part of yesterday self-indulgently admiring a public take-down I'd done on an entry in the OED, and the rest of the day ripping apart another entry in a specialised Cant dictionary, neither activity likely to make me any friends) and a bit of the remainder watching and listening to Willie Rogers and Ray Charles sing "Seven Spanish Angels", and then skipping over to remind myself of how the bare words looked on the -- I was about to say, "page", but I was reading them on a computer screen ...
Jezus, that sentence got lost somewhere along the way ...
Whatever, I won't go too far (pedantically) into just quite why your remark, "the “dictionary” distinction between them," got smack up my nose.
Just, "dictionaries" -- "Which one is he talking about, and who reads the definitions anyway? Definitions are editorial commentary, opinion, and should be treated as such," was what strolled through what passes for my mind.
Robin
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