Showing posts with label Have You Noticed You're Alive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Have You Noticed You're Alive. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

The Buckinghams' "Have You Noticed You're Alive"

This morning I listened to two albums by the Buckinghams released on one disc: Time & Charges and Portraits.  I noticed a small grammatical thing in "Have You Noticed You're Alive" from Portraits.  One of the lines is "You feel your troubles deep."  "Deep" could be either a flat adverb (a shortened form of deeply so that it rhymes with "sleep" from an earlier line) or an adjective modifying "troubles" with the word order inverted ("troubles deep" instead of "deep troubles").  The meaning isn't changed too much between these two parsings, but one emphasizes the depth of the troubles where the other emphasizes the degree to which they're felt.