I meant to post about this back when TTPD was released and never got around to it, but it's so touching to me that Taylor has peppered so many British-isms into the album, and not just in a jokey kind of way like in "London Boy" back in the Lover days.
It's such a beautiful, subtle nod to how much that was her life for years, and to the marks the city and the muse(s) left on her. Because isn't that true of any of us when we've been around a person for so long, or live in a place we've made into our home? You start picking up their speech patterns until they become second nature. (For instance, one of my best friends moved abroad for university, and before long she started dropping in words like "fortnight," "lorry,""shops" (vs. stores) into conversation when we'd speak, which only got stronger along with her accent shifting as the years went by and she stayed there.) Kind of a love language code switching.
It’s sprinkled throughout the album. “For a fortnight” in “Fortnight,” “blokes” on “The Alchemy,” “the shops,”* in “How Did It End?” I think my favourite use of it is in “The Bolter,” because it’s such a classic twangy yeehaw Taylor song, but she’s got these tiny turns of phrase that point to where she spent a large portion of her adult life. (E.g. “best mates,” “out the drive,”* “wish he wouldn’t be sore,”*)(*yes I know these aren’t like, specifically not-American, but as someone who has grown up with North American English in the same generation as Taylor, these definitely feel anachronistic/foreign. Like if I hear someone say “the shops” instead of “the store,” “drive” instead of driveway or “sore” meaning upset, I’m thinking they either watch a lot of 1950s movies or they’re from the UK. And yes I know it’s to make everything rhyme BUT THAT’S THE POINT SHE IS MAKING THEM RHYME ON PURPOSE ok I’m stopping now before the linguistics nerd in me jumps out) It’s such a cool merging of influences, much like the album as a whole fuses together experiences and muses and sounds.
And that gets back to the “I love this place for so long,”of it all. The place is the city, the place is her home, the place is the person, and they are all part of her. To me, these are part of the subtext of the album, of the big love she once felt for all of it, and how it changed her. And, why it hurt so much to leave it all behind. So she’s starting over back home in America, but she’s taking a little bit of London with her for its curtain call on TTPD.
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[Text id:
"I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart...I do nothing all day, boredom settles in, I look at the sky so I get to feel even smaller than I already feel and my mind keeps poisoning itself uselessly." ]
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of SylviaPlath
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my friend is a little bit not right and i want to prove it by making another poll about cereals
by cereals i mean cold cereals that you buy and have to only put them in a bowl with milk
my friend defends himself with americans and thats why i make this poll
cold or warm milk to cereals?
(expanded version)
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Sometimes I wonder how much fanfic of classical/iconic literature exists because of school projects. Just floating out there. In a drive somewhere. Not to mention that nothing is more unhinged than bored middle/highschoolers being forced to liven up books they might not care about. For every deranged ao3 crossover fic there is an infinitely more deranged crackfic written for the great gatsby or antigone or to kill a mockingbird or whatever by a bored highschooler and his friends for 10th grade English. I wanna read it
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