5 Comments

I saw Music Man as a kid, and you have brought back memories and explanations of sequences ("what do you talk" and "peck a little" [if I remember correctly]).

Your linguistic wizardry was too much for me, and it extracted 50 bucks from beneath my mattress!

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I've always thought that expressions like "read a little" or "play a little" were a shortening or stand in for "for a little while." That seems to match up with the "pick a little" lyric.

It's interesting how "little bit," "little," and "bit" became almost interchangeable references to time, and also to various verbs or other adjectives.

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Regarding how people really speak, I find reading transcripts and comparing that experience with having listened to the original audio fascinating as the transcript shows just how goofy speech actually is. I do not hear the fragmentation, rambling asides, unfinished thoughts, etc, as much as when I read them. I can generally follow the meaning in speech far better than I can its text. The text provides a very interesting record of what would otherwise be considered near unintelligible, at least to me.

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The next step after reducing to the initials "WTF" is to read them off in one of those encoded alphabets: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

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This was a fantastic episode, and now I'm listening to the new Broadway cast recording of The Music Man 😁 thanks!

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