The Dow Is Up!

Because he doesn’t know the words. Or so the old joke goes. But there’s another annoying thing you can do when you don’t know the words: pretend that you do. I like to call it the “It’s the End of the World” syndrome.

Everybody knows the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” It’s a very catchy tune. Very singalongable. (It’s a word. Shut up.) The only problem is that nobody knows the words. (By the way, have you ever encountered someone who knows the words? Hearing them sing along to the song is awe-inducing. I’m more impressed by people who bothered to learn the 100 or so words to the song than those weirdos who memorize thousands of digits of pi.)

So when a “normal” person sings along to “It’s the End of the World,” it usually goes something like this:

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
And I feel fine.

Six o’clock, don’t get caught
Bbb bup, dbddb bdup
Mmmm bbup ddllbeep boop
LEONARD BERNSTEIN!

(By the way, there’s a similar response with Madonna’s “Vogue.” But since that song sucks, I’m not going to bother naming the phenomenon after it.)

Not knowing the words doesn’t actually stop you from singing. Instead, you sing a lot quieter and just kind of mumble your way through the song. The goal is to sing so quietly that nobody can make out what you’re saying, but loud enough that they can tell that you’re saying SOMEthing.

I’ve always wondered what makes people do this. It never occurred to me that I should really be questioning when people START doing this. The reason is that Luke has recently started doing this when I read him books. Generally, he knows one word per page, usually the very last word. And so he tries to read along with me. But what I end up getting is something like: “mmmm mmmm nnnn mmmm snow.”

If you haven’t had someone do this to you while you’re reading, it’s EXTREMELY annoying. It makes it incredibly hard to concentrate on actually reading the book. I know what you’re thinking: “You’re reading a book to a 2-year-old. How much frigging concentration do you need?” The answer is: a lot.

The reason is that these books are confusing. They have a lot of rhymes in them. They repeat a lot. But they don’t always repeat exactly every word. And if you’re reading Dr. Seuss, he makes up ridiculous words just because he can’t think of anything else to rhyme. (Dr. Seuss really annoys me right now. Honestly. I wish I could be inside his brain as he was writing this stuff. “’There was a knock on the door.’ Huh, what rhymes with ‘door’? ‘More’? ‘Score’? I’ve got it! ‘In walked a hufflepoor.’” GAH!)

Anyway, if you’re reading and you’ve got someone right next to you repeating every word you say half a beat late and/or saying “mmmm mmmm,” you completely forget what you’re saying. All context is gone. You’re basically just seeing words and saying them, hoping that you’re not ruining the pace or meaning. Basically, it’s like when you tried to read out loud in front of your reading group in grade school. Your only hope was to not screw up so that the other kids would say, “it’s pronounced MALapropism, not malaPROPism.” Second graders can be so cruel.