[Ads-l] _on the bone_ in the UD

Mark Mandel thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Thu Mar 8 17:14:39 UTC 2018


IIRC, the line in context is

Troll's old seat is still the same
and the bone he boned from its owner.
 Doner,
 Boner!
Troll's old seat is still the same
and the bone he boned from its owner.

The two one-word lines are part of the song's structure, where between the
last two lines and their repetition come two trochees, rhyming with the
last word, not necessarily making sense.

Way back when I was in high school and LotR had only been released in the
US for a year or two, I said to a classmate something like "I've made up a
tune for the troll song," and sang the first verse. She answered "That's
'The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night'!" (as the title goes around here), and
of course it was, with only minor deviations. I'd recognized the unique
structure without realizing it and used the tune that it went with.

Mark, music magnet (not magnate, alas)


On Mar 7, 2018 10:25 AM, "Barretts Mail" <mail.barretts at gmail.com> wrote:

>Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” also has the word in the troll poem (“The Fox Went
out on a Stormy Night”). BB
​

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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