Thursday, March 19, 2015

"If I Fell"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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Listening to A Hard Day's Night last week, I found an interesting connection between "If I Fell" and "Anna (Go to Him)" from Please Please Me: both have the same grammatical error.

"If I Fell" has the line "You / Would love me more than her," and "Anna (Go to Him)" has "You say he loves you more than me."  Both of these are comparisons, but the second element in each comparison is in the accusative case where it should be in the nominative, so "You / Would love me more than she [loved me]" and "You say he loves you more than I [love you]."

"Anna (Go to Him)" is one of the songs in the Beatles catalogue that they didn't write (it was written by Arthur Alexander), and while I'm not sure if there's any real connection between "If I Fell" and "Anna (Go to Him)" (I'm fairly certain I've run into this same error in other songs), I still thought it interesting that they mess up in the same way.