It seemed to come out of nowhere. Unexpected. Unbidden. A tune, a musical phrase, a hook. But not
from nowhere, of course. Rather from the distant past, those days
when the brain was young and spongy, impressionable, formative,
when a song, or just enough of one, could get stuck in the tissues
and lie in wait (for decades!), waiting to bubble up and pop open in
a moment of blissful empty-headedness.
An earworm.
So it was recently with Far Away
Places. An innocuous melody. A dreamy, drifty, waltzy kind of
thing. One day I’m walking along and there it was, singing itself
plaintively inside my head in a voice much like my own, filled with a simple longing. All I could remember of its origins were that
they went way back. Far away places, are calling to me... I
hardly knew the words at all, but the melody and sentiment were alive
in my head. I “knew” it by feeling.
I found a Willy Nelson version on
YouTube (a duet with Sheryl Crow), and nothing wrong with it (we love
Willy), but also a Sam Cooke version, more proof of his voice’s
Midas touch (we idolize Sam).
But what’s with earworms, anyway?
The surprise appearance of Far Away Places hit a sweet spot
for me, but don’t we think of earworms as annoyances? Songs that you once wished you would never hear again, yet keep
coming back to vex you like an old injury? You know. The
Pina Colada Song or Afternoon Delight or Muskrat Love?
I have a vague sense of the
term taking hold in popular usage some years back and wondered if it
would even turn up in any of my dictionaries. It didn’t. But the Merriam/Webster online
dictionary had it: “a song or melody that keeps repeating in one's
mind.” Okay, very succinct. But what about an OED-style reference
to the date of a first-published use of the word.
My oldest dictionary (The Oxford
Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles, copyright 1955) refers
me to “corn” for clarity on “earworm” but the entry preceding
it, "earwig," catches attention. Yes, we're talking about those nasty
insects with the rear-end pincers, suspected by our ancestors of
crawling into ears and taking up residence in brains (“wicga”
means insect in Old English). OED tells us that “earwig” as a
transitive verb means “to pester by private importunities; to bias
by secret communications; to insinuate into the confidence of,” and
as a noun means “a whisperer, flatterer, parasite.”
So, while earworms may pester us, or
somehow insinuate themselves into the fiber of our consciousness,
they are unlikely to ever feel as negative or threatening as earwigs.
Like worm holes, those possible interstellar portals to the past,
future, or who-knows-what kind of far away places, ear worms,
mysterious little burrowers in our brains, may turn out to be good
things, at least occasionally.
McMuscial Calendar
Saturday, January 28
Come on out to The Pfharmacy in Lake Mills to hear The Birdddog Blues Band. It's the new beer-and-music venue to the nearby Tyranena Brewing. 7 to 10 pm
More stuff in the works. Check back.
