When I first heard Abba’s magnificent 1982 swansong ‘The Day Before You Came’, I’d never come across the Americanised use of the verb ‘make’, meaning ‘reach’. So the line ‘I must have made my desk around a quarter after nine’ baffled me. Given the Swedish obsession with self-assembly furniture, I even wondered whether Björn was using the word conventionally, and Ms Fältskog was in fact kneeling on the floor aligning Tab A with Groove C, while looking for the elusive Allen key with which to attach the castors.
On the other hand, if you are British, the lyrics to the Beach Boys’ song ‘Little Deuce Coupe’ are like the poem ‘Jabberwocky’, in that you can perfectly understand what the writer is getting at, even though you haven’t the foggiest what most of the words mean. Even ‘Deuce’ and ‘Coupe’: ‘She’s got a competition clutch with the four on the floor/ and she purrs like a kitten till the lake pipes roar.’
The problem with ordinary modern cars is they are so reliably boring they give you nothing to talk about
For the uninitiated, ‘four on the floor’ means a four-speed manual transmission with a floor-mounted gear-stick.
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