Sunday, April 12, 2009

HERE I AM, THE ONE WHOM YOU LOVE: So the Cosmo family was dining at our favorite local pizza place tonight, and I commented to Mr. Cosmo that Radio Favorite Pizza Place must be tuned to a particularly fabulous Lite-FM station, because "Two Less Lonely People in the World" was playing. (An Air Supply song that one just doesn't hear that often, even if one seeks out the Lite as I do.) Mr. Cosmo grumbled that this is a song that particularly gets on his nerves, even among Air Supply songs. I asked why, and he pointed out that the lyric really should be "two fewer lonely people in the world." (This is indeed a particular Mr. Cosmo peeve.) This threw me for a loop for a moment -- never in my several hundred times listening to the song had this grammatical point occurred to me -- but then I realized something.

All this time I had been thinking that previously there were n lonely people in the world and now there were n-2 lonely people in the world. But what if there had always been the exact same number of lonely people in the world, but now two of them are simply lonely to a somewhat lesser degree than they had been previously? And so I tip my hat to Graham Russell and Russell Graham, lyricists of greater depth and grammatical specificity than I had ever imagined. Truly, it boggles the mind.

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