{"id":2243,"date":"2011-12-20T16:34:23","date_gmt":"2011-12-20T20:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=2243"},"modified":"2011-12-20T16:42:21","modified_gmt":"2011-12-20T20:42:21","slug":"advent-of-holiday-horror-song-6-with-bonus-nattering-nabobs-of-nativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=2243","title":{"rendered":"Advent of Holiday Horror: Song 6, with bonus Nattering Nabobs of Nativity!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hear a lot of people talking about the “War on Christmas.”\u00a0\u00a0 There’s a wonderful discussion going on right now about all this in Leesburg, Va, where some folks\u00a0have put up a creche<\/a>, and some other folks have put up a dedication to the mythos of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.\u00a0 Me, I say that if you want to call something a war, you ought to look around you\u00a0at the vets returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and look for the ones who didn’t make it home, before you start opening your mouth and using words like “war.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

The difference between saying Happy Holidays and saying Merry Christmas isn’t war.\u00a0 It’s being inclusive.\u00a0 As my old buddy Spiro T. Agnew might have said, America right now seems to\u00a0have\u00a0more than its share of Nattering Nabobs of Nativity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In doublechecking that quote, I ran across this one:\u00a0 “A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.” \u00a0Justice Harry Blackman, concurring opinion, Lee v. Weisman, 1992.\u00a0 I think I like it.<\/p>\n

So, is my advent countdown of crappy holiday songs part of the wider war on Christmas?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Some songs just suck.\u00a0 Some of them were fine, once, back in the day, and have simply outlived their relevance, like the theory that the earth is round, or the band Nine Inch Nails.\u00a0 (There were about 2 weeks, back in 1993, when NIN was an important band, and the round earth theory made sense for nearly twice that long.)\u00a0 These songs can now be safely relegated to history’s dustbins, the Smithsonian, and Uncle Ziggy’s old 8-Track tape collection, since the tape player broke 3 years ago and the last company making the repair parts went under in 2003.<\/p>\n

At number 6 in the list is a boring little number that was written in 1946 and wisely shut up in a box for more than twenty years, until it clawed its way out\u00a0on its pogrom of\u00a0boredom in 1970.\u00a0 I speak, of course, of the eldritch creeping soporific horror that is Karen Carpenter’s\u00a0“Merry Christmas Darling.”<\/p>\n

The logs on the fire \/ Fill me with desire<\/em><\/p>\n

Yeah, because pyromaniacs are hot, baby!\u00a0<\/p>\n

We’re apart, that’s true<\/em>
\nBut I can dream, and in my dreams<\/em>
\nI’m Christmasing with you<\/em><\/p>\n

All I want for Christmas is a gerundial clause.\u00a0 You see, using existential non-verb clauses with gerunds allows for underspecification of inner participants, affecting topic-focus articulation. \u00a0As the gerundial form in this case has objects introduced by prepositional\u00a0verbs that nominally take normative direct objects and manner adverbials are expressed by adjectives (and not with adverbs), we can regard it as a deverbal noun, which implies that it is lemmatized as noun and the missing inner participant (you, because we’re apart, that’s true) of the corresponding verb is not inserted. It gets, though, the whole range of “verbal” functors according to the meaning of the given modifications.<\/p>\n

Or as my good friend Calvin said, “Verbing weirds language.”<\/p>\n

Go ahead.\u00a0 Click!\u00a0 Get your verb on with Karen.\u00a0 Or better yet, wait until tonight –\u00a0because this song will put your ass to sleep faster than washing that Lunesta down with a shot of Nyquil.<\/p>\n

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