There's "landmark" and then there's "spray-painted graffiti on a rock"...

But seriously, I can see how that's please a crowd.

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And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis

It's always very encouraging when you can do that.

But again, it was context. In that case we were there as entertainers, not as Trad musicians per se. Even an entertainer may have standards, but whether as entertainer or steward of tradition, snobbery belittles, so if you want more gigs, don't insult your audience. Otherwise, gigging in a purely traditional context, Danny Boy remains unthinkable. Just can't make up my mind...

Even so, I'd be lying if I said that the doo-wop trespass wasn't a bid to absolve us of our sin for doing Danny Boy at all.

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"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles

"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano

I'm not so sure about this - although you have a decent enough point in general about the tradition not being just 'old'. For the dance tunes part of the tradition, I'd say that all those 'modern' compositions are mostly from the latter half of the twentieth century rather than the first half, when it strikes me that not all much happened in terms of tune composition. Quite a lot of the more modern songs are also from later in the twentieth century rather than earlier. Mind, my feeling on this is just an impression; I don't know for sure.


I think s1m0n has it right here. (Well, apart from the redundant apostrophe in the possessive pronoun "its" .)

Meanwhile, here's the seminal performance of Danny Boy for you.

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I interpret s1m0n's quote as such: "To the extent that traditional musicians resent it, it is because it has largely been imposed on the tradition by outsiders." (Italicized slight rephrase is mine.) Or did I miss a joke there?

At any rate, this thread is making me glad I have never played a gig as a musician. (Truthfully, I still don't consider myself a musician.)

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Whistle No.1: Walton's Irish, soprano D
Whistle No. 2: green Feadóg Original, soprano D

Quite so. Brilliant, that.

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And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis

No. What you missed was "It's popularity ...".

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It's an emotional performance, that.

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I've had another think about this ... Why did you flag up polkas? In Ireland, they (together with mazurkas etc) date from the early part of the nineteenth century, which strikes me as well within the 'old' traditional era that we would think of for other tunes and tune types.

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He's talking about the "It's" that starts the second sentence down from the it's you spotted.

~~

It's a debated point. The apostrophe is the least stable piece of punctuation in English, from its inception as the punctus elevatus in late middle english until the present day. The rule I learned in grade school was that the apostrophe marks A) contraction (as in the case you spotted) and B) possession (as "s1m0n's quote". The question, then, is whether the possessive "it's" is the pronoun "it" plus the possessive marker 's, or whether the word "its" is a stand-alone pronoun in its own right, like the pronoun "his". Historically, the word that became "it" was "hit", and the genitive (possessive) declension was ~es. The masculine pronoun "his" existed in its final form back in Old English (Anglo-Saxon). The neuter pronoun "its" was still in the form "hites" (nominally - it more often showed up shortened into "his", just like the masc pronoun). It arrived in it's current form (it's or its) during middle english, 3-600 years later, about the same time the punctus elevatus showed up.

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And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis

I know what he's talking about. I was pointing out that he didn't know what I was talking about.



No it's not. An apostrophe in the neutral possessive pronoun "its" is simply wrong. The problem with its misuse is that the reader (me, for instance) is always pulled up short. I find that, whenever it's used incorrectly, in the possessive pronoun, I have to check and double check to make sure I understand what the writer is on about. That's not good communication, in any language. And it's certainly not good English.

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That's a crossed-post. I was draughting my response to Dan while you posted ahead of me.

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And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis

It think you'll find, ben, that if you examine the writings of some of the best english stylists over the past few centuries, the issue is much less clear cut than you've been led to believe.

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And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis

I'm perfectly happy to look them up. Who were you thinking of?

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Yep, that's exactly what happens for me too. An "it's" where it should be "its" interrupts my reading while I'm re-reading the sentence.
We're off-topic w.r.t. the OP of course. But it baffles me that so many native English speakers (writers, I mean) seem to write "it's" all the time, while non-native speakers rarely have a problem separating the two..

Addendum: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-a ... 27s-vs-its

Good article. Thanks for that.

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