From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I just saw the currently running Broadway production of The Music Man with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster.
And you know what?
Ignore all the snarky knocks
if you're a theater person and you've heard any it's absolutely spectacular But of course I've seen many productions of it and so every now and then my mind wandered I was with my daughters,
thinking about some other things, and of course, where my mind wandered occasionally was language.
And you know, Music Man is better than you might think,
especially if you don't like musicals, you think of it as this thing,
you know, in broad colors about some flim-flam man and,
you know, all the songs are with three chords.
No, actually, Music Man is not only musically quite sophisticated in many ways,
but it's a really interesting book.
as we call it in the biz, script.
There are all sorts of things in Music Man that I find very real in terms of colloquial language.
And I thought I would share that with you here and use it as a springboard
for giving you a sense of how language really works in terms of what we often call syntax.
And syntax, when linguistics is taught,
is often given as these abstract trees that look kind of like the way people are taught to parse sentences in catholic school or used to be but more and more it's becoming clear that syntax is something else and you know of all things music man gets you thinking about it so one of the things i mean is something that you probably think is just a funny little something in Music Man
if you happen to know the score.
And this is the opening number where a bunch of salesmen are in a train car.