Three Little YouTube Asides.

I was just listening to Loreena McKennit’s track Prospero’s Speech on YouTube. The title said ‘with lyrics.’ The song is, unsurprisingly, a musical setting of the speech made by Prospero at the end of The Tempest. So, call me elitist if you like, but referring to one of Shakespeare’s most famous passages as ‘lyrics’ seems oddly disrespectful. OK, I’m elitist.

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I also noticed that the name of one of the commenters was ‘lardmonk.’ I don’t know what ‘lard’ means in other parts of the world, but in Britain it’s the name given to refined beef fat, and when I was a kid, a common component of the invective aimed at a person deemed to be useless was ‘ya great lump of lard!’ Lard plus Monk paints a pretty picture, doesn’t it? I wonder how he came by it.

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And to hark back to a bygone age, a few nights ago I watched the Russian Dervish sequence from Riverdance. The uploader referred to the three men and three women as 'a group of virtuous dancers.'  I suppose he wasn't terribly virtuoso in English.