Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 February 2

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February 2

Sweet Dreams are made of...?

The song title indicates that it's "this" (as at Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)), but Annie Lennox is pretty clearly saying "these" every time the word gets used. Has she or Stewart ever commented on this? They wrote the song themselves, so it's not like they were twisting someone else's words to provide assonance with "disagree" and rhyme with "seas". Do folks from Aberdeen just pronounce -is as -eez? Matt Deres (talk) 17:19, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

It is not uncommon to alter the pronunciation of words in poetry or songs to force a rhyme. This song is hardly unique in that regard. Consider "Anarchy in the UK", where John Lydon rhymes "Anarchist" with "Antichrist" by pronouncing the first "an-ar-KAYST". English poetry has a long history in this regard. --Jayron32 17:23, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow; why alter the pronunciation of "this" when you could just say "these"? Matt Deres (talk) 00:36, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Because it rhymes with seas. --Jayron32 02:03, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

I think Matt meant, why not make the official lyric "these" instead of "this"? It seems like a reasonable point; the referent of "this" is vague enough that it seems like it could just as well be plural. But maybe the lyricist thought there was a clear referent. --Trovatore (talk) 19:18, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

For decades I thought it was "these". It's actually more like "thee-is". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:30, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

I've just listened to it, and I think she's just dragging out the vowel. It's more successful the second time around, but as Bugs says, the first time it appears to have two distinct syllables. Alansplodge (talk) 18:12, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

I wonder if she has ever commented on this? You'd think someone would have asked her in an interview. μηδείς (talk) 21:49, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

I read a few articles on Annie Lennox, after Jodie Foster she was one of my first big crushes, and that seems to be a majority topic when you search that song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeMFqkcPYcg). Listening to the song, my impression is that Bugs and Alan are correct, she simply lengthens the "ih" vowel of this (i.e., IPA /ðɪ:s/ which does not exist in American English, and is hence interpreted by naive (in the sense of untrained) listeners as /ði:s/ (> /ði:z/). μηδείς (talk) 02:29, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

If I were in her shoes, I'd be a bit miffed that people are more interested in her pronunciation of that word than in the rest of the song. I wonder if you're old enough to remember when phone operators would pronounce "please" like "plee-uhz"? The other question is whether it "should" be "this" or "these". Does it refer to the singular "something" everyone's looking for, or does it refer to the plural list of those "somethings"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:45, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Well, the song's title and lyrics both say "this" and the group obviously did this intentionally. Also, it corresponds to "everybody's looking for something"; not for looking for things.

As to operators, we had 1FR service, not a party line, and operator calls were far too expensive. I routinely carried a dime for payphonable emergencies. I never used one until the early eighties, when I made person-to-person collect calls from college via payphone, then hung up before the call was put through. (This was a signal simply to call me back directly at the same payphone, whose number my family knew.)

I do, of course, remember Lily Tomlin's shtick. μηδείς (talk) 18:05, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

One further point is that there is a slurred change of note during "this" (F to E), see the sheet music, which may account for it sounding bi-syllabic. Alansplodge (talk) 17:32, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Annie Lennox is, of course, Scottish and this pronunciation is normal for her. TammyMoet (talk) 19:22, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Er, what? This is not a typical feature of the Aberdonian accent. Matt did ask about this above, and the answer is no. Henry^Flower 19:59, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Well it chimes with what I've heard of her speech. --TammyMoet (talk) 15:54, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

Resources for writing style

Especially, I'm interested in prescriptive rules that can be applied to unit above sentence level, like paragraphs, or even whole texts. For example, using topic sentence, lead paragraph and so on. --Llaanngg (talk) 18:53, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

For journalistic writing, there's News style. Also, see all the wikilinks in Rhetorical mode. Loraof (talk) 20:59, 2 February 2017 (UTC) Also, Thesis#Structure and presentation style. Loraof (talk) 21:09, 2 February 2017 (UTC) Also, Essay#Forms and styles and Introduction (writing). Loraof (talk) 21:19, 2 February 2017 (UTC) Also, Dramatic structure#Freytag's analysis. Loraof (talk) 21:31, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

And writing style. Loraof (talk) 01:24, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Elements of style has fans and detractors, but all will readily agree it has prescriptions that can be applied above sentence level. Chicago manual of style too. But there's nothing entirely general. A guide to writing an essay (e.g. [1], [2]) is probably not a good thing to follow when writing a screen play. That format has its own style guides, e.g. [3]. If you have a specific type of writing in mind, let us know, and we can probably offer better, more targeted resources. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:21, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Visit the the website of the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL). -- Deborahjay (talk) 16:26, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

As SemanticMantis points out, there's no one style of writing, it varies depending on what you're writing (e.g. an academic paper or a news article) and then varies further depending on the exact details (e.g. philosophy and physics papers vary widely, as do Financial Times and Buzzfeed). And to make matters even more complicated, a lot of traditional rules (e.g. don't use "I" in academic papers, don't use contractions in news reporting) are currently changing. The more I look into the topic the less convinced I am that there are many hard rules on how to write beyond the core of: know your audience, know how they think, know what they expect from the kind of writing you are performing, and match those expectations. If you want to write academically, genre analysis studies can help you understand the usual expectations in the area you plan to write. English for Academic Purposes has some good, basic information. Daduzi ^talk 12:10, 7 February 2017 (UTC)