There are at least 2 big "nothing" songs: "Nothing Was Delivered" and "Too Much of Nothing." These are songs you can find searching for other words, like "sympathize"...
Nothing was delivered... or "freeze"...
But I can’t say I sympathize
With what your fate is going to be
Yes, for telling all those lies
Now, too much of nothingThere's also "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" — and a search of the website for "nothin'" works to find it.
Can make a man feel ill at ease
One man’s temper might rise
While another man’s temper might freeze
In the day of confession
We cannot mock a soul
Oh, when there’s too much of nothing
No one has control
Listen to me pretty babyI think the nothing result for "nothing" is a deliberate joke.
Lay your hand upon my head
Beyond here lies nothin'
Nothin' done and nothin' said
_____________________
* Deliberate reference to "Desolation Row" — "Yes, I received your letter yesterday/(About the time the doorknob broke)/When you asked how I was doing/Was that some kind of joke?"
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28 comments:
Probably the search uses the javascript concept of "truthiness."
Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'
I just might tell you the truth
We've discussed here before that it's a crappy search engine.
When you search bobdylan.com for song lyrics with the word "nothing," you get... nothing.
When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
The search engine took you literally!
Perhaps it's just the sly trickster at work?
That is passing strange. As an experiment, I did a search for the string "noth" and got 39 song results. All of them, I think, are hits for the word "nothin'" (with an apostrophe at the end), which is apparently how Dylan most frequently rendered the word "nothing." But curiously, even the search for "noth" did not turn up instances of "nothing."
It might be a joke, but I suspect some other cause. It is possible that the word "nothing" is somehow coded to trigger a null result, which inadvertently makes searches for "nothing" impossible.
Speaking of nothin', I always thought Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose was ≥ When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose.
The man from Hibbing doesn't have the word in his vocabulary, but he does have the word nothin'.
Etienne said...
Who's this Bob Dylan guy? Can he sing?
No. But that's never stopped him from doing so anyway.
Chicks for free.
I have a new theory! I think "nothing" must be one of this search index's stop words. A "stop word" is a word filtered out of a search query because it is considered too common to yield useful results.
I did searches on the Dylan site for several common words that I know are in Dylan's lyrics, words like: too, that, we, you, and so. All of them, instead of finding hundreds of hits, found zero. That means they are stop words. My theory is that "nothing" is on the list of stop words for this site.
Ann, take this in the right way. Your Dylan obsession borders on obsession.
"I did searches on the Dylan site for several common words that I know are in Dylan's lyrics, words like: too, that, we, you, and so. All of them, instead of finding hundreds of hits, found zero. That means they are stop words. My theory is that "nothing" is on the list of stop words for this site."
I tested that theory with the word "man," which worked.
I tried sing and thing and forget and love — and all of those worked.
They need to code the lyrics with semantic tags so that search engines can 'get' their importance. One of the things that HTML5 is about, but it assumes that a human with their wits about them is coding it, a fatal flaw.
"Ann, take this in the right way. Your Dylan obsession borders on obsession."
It's just that I got a lot of lyrics stuck in my head when I was young. They spring to mind very easily and get to be in the stream of consciousness that becomes the writing.
I don't feel a special personal love toward him. I rarely listen to the music. I just have it in memory. I like the words that I know on the deep level that was possible when I was a teenager.
Also a lot of the attitude influenced me when I was young -- an attitude toward authority and individuality that became part of my own personality.
I'd say he's the artist I internalized the most.
There are a few others. Plus Jesus.
-- "I tested that theory with the word 'man,' which worked."
That means man -- and love and thing and forget -- are not on the site's list of stop words.
I searched for other short words like 'day' and 'boy' and they worked, too. I even had success searching for the two-letter string 'ol' and got three results (but they were only hitting the word Ol' like in "Tell Ol' Bill" and not matching for lyrics with cold or told or dollar etc.)
So, I conclude that this site has a pretty weird and esoteric search algorithm.
Althouse says:
"Also a lot of the attitude influenced me when I was young -- an attitude toward authority and individuality that became part of my own personality."
"I'd say he's the artist I internalized the most. "
In an earlier post I commented:
"Where I was going to go: how a life of internalizing Dylan's lyrics helped shape Althouse's thought processes regarding the assessing of events and culture..."
Notice our common use of "internalized".
Althouse is trolling me.
I am Laslo.
The internet has plenty of nothing, and nothing should be plenty for you.
Re: Sean Gleeson:
I suspect it's running off of a standard stop word list, like this one for MySQL. Note that "nothing" and "too," "that," "we," "you," and "so" are all on this list. "Man," "day," and "boy" are not.
@Balfegor: Yeah, I figured it was from a standard list somewhere, thanks for finding that. (I would have been really surprised if the site was using a custom stop list for Bob Dylan lyrics!)
But I still find it weird how a search for "noth" can return partial matches, but a search for "ol" only returns whole-word matches. Maybe it searches for whole-word matches first, then only if it doesn't find any of those, returns partial-word matches?
I'd say he's the artist I internalized the most. [...] Plus Jesus.
The Artist Formerly Known as Jesus?
You probably didn't mean it that way, but it's an interesting thought: Jesus as Artist. Or lyricist, maybe.
Hey, Ann, just came back and saw your comments. I was teasing. I'm the same way with the Beatles. Learned virtually all their songs and even the chords. I don't listen much anymore but the words -- especially Lennon's -- are ever near me.
In a text database of static or semi-static content the text is not searched sequentially but it is "inverted" - the document is scanned and the contents are recorded in an index.
Common words (and, the, etc.) are excluded from the index. More sophisticated indexing systems, like Google, will include a list of synonyms for each word. You can modify the search by using directives. Examples follow:
black hole ~ 72,900,000 results.
"black hole" ~ 34,000,000 results.
"black" "hole" ~ 70,900,000 results.
"black" AROUND(10) "hole" ~ 255,000,000 results.
"black" AROUND(2) "hole" ~ 252,000,000 results.
For a handy list see: http://www.hbagency.com/every-google-search-operator-youll-ever-need/
Fuck you everybody, my truthiness joke was funny.
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