33) Not Crying - Part 4

Hello and welcome to Learning English with Lyrics! I am your host Jake, and today we are finally wrapping up our series on the song "Not Crying" by Flight of the Conchords. I hope you've been enjoying it as much as I have! If you haven't heard our previous episodes in this series, I highly recommend starting with Part 1 for the full context. If this is your first time ever listening to this podcast, welcome! I'm glad that you could join us. Before continuing, I recommend listening to the episode titled "Introduction", which will explain a bit more about this podcast. Alright, let's finish up this song!

"These aren't tears of sadness, they're tears of joy, I'm just laughing"

Here we have two simple phrases, "tears of sadness" and "tears of joy". These are simply describing what type of crying someone might be doing. We discussed this for a bit in the last episode. Obviously, the most common type of crying is to cry tears of sadness, but it is of course possible to be so happy that you cry as well. He's being very extreme now, pretending that his deep sadness is actually just immense happiness! His lying is getting more and more ridiculous by the minute.

So, after his very sad sounding laughter, he gives us a metaphor. What exactly is a metaphor? Well, a metaphor is when you explain something using non-literal language. For example if I say, "I am an early bird!" that is a metaphor. I'm not literally a bird that is early. What it means is that, much like a bird who wakes up early, I also wake up early.

So he's going to give us a series of metaphors to explain his current situation. These aren't literal, and of course, there will be some jokes in here.

He starts with, "I'm sitting at this table called love"

So, again, he's not literally sitting at a table. However, he wants you to picture love as a table, and see that he is sitting at the table. This is to help paint the picture, that is to say, to help you see something about his situation that you might not otherwise see.

In truth, it's so he can make some metaphorical jokes, but we'll get to that in a second.

So he's sitting at this table called love, "staring down at the irony of life..."

What exactly does he mean by that? Well, it's not completely clear. When something is "ironic", that means that it is the opposite of what it's meant to mean or does the opposite of what it's supposed to do. For example, let's say that you've been eating too many donuts, and you've gotten really unhealthy. And your doctor tells you that you've got to stop eating so many donuts or you're going to die young! Try eating more apples instead. So you go home, and you start eating an apple, and you choke to death on the apple. You died ironically. You were eating the apple to make yourself live longer, but instead it made you die quicker.

"The irony of life" is a very general statement he's making about how often life deals with us ironically. That is to say, things that happen in life are often contrary to what they are meant to be like.

These final two lines are really great.

The first one says, "How come we've reached this fork in the road".

If you're not familiar with the phrase "How come" it simply means "Why", and in most cases, I'd recommend using "why" instead.

So let's add it to our song. "Why have we reached this fork in the road"?

What exactly is a fork?

Well, it can be many things.

The first, and most common definition of fork, is a piece of cutlery or silverware. It's something you eat with. I'm sure you know what a fork is.

But a fork can also refer to a split or a divide, usually in a path or a road. For example, if you're driving down a road and suddenly it splits into two seperate roads, the point where it splits is called a "fork". You might also see the word fork when talking about something like a snake or a lizard's tongue. Often, their tongues are "forked", that is to say, they split into two parts at the end. Someone who is "fork-tongued" is someone who is being compared to a snake. This usually means that they are being deceitful or lying about something.

Back to our song lyrics, what does it mean to have reached a fork in the road? Well, if you've reached a fork in the road you have to decide if you're going to turn right or turn left. Now again, he's speaking metaphorically, so what do you think this represents? Metaphorically, a fork in the road represents a decision point. This is the place where a decision must be made and you can't go back. In the case of our song, she has decided to go one way, and it's a different direction than he is going to go.

The cleverness here, is that this is a metaphor INSIDE of another metaphor. Remember, our first metaphor is that he's sitting at the table. So he's sitting at a table, and looking down. At a real table you'd see your silverware in front of you: a spoon, a knife...and a fork. So he wants us to be thinking about a metaphorical fork, but also another layer deeper, a different kind of metaphorical fork. It's an inception of metaphors!

In fact, he's going to go back up a layer in our inception of metaphors with our final line.

"And yet it cuts like a knife!"

This is pretty great. If something "cuts like a knife" that means it hurts a lot. In this case, metaphorically speaking, we're not talking about an actual cut but an emotional cut. This type of metaphor, is called a simile. When you see the word "like" used this way, you can almost always assume it's a simile. It cuts like a knife. You eat like a pig. He is acting like a madman.

So let's bring it all together. He's basically saying that this decision that she made hurt him a lot. A pretty sad ending to our song.

That's all we have for today, and that's all we have for this song. I hope that you *aren't* crying and that you enjoyed our journey through this song. I am already looking forward to next time when we start on a brand new song! I hope that you'll join us and I'll talk to you then.

As always, you can find the transcript for this episode in the description. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate it and subscribe, wherever you're listening to it! And of course, don't forget to tell your friends about us! We post a new episode every Wednesday! We also have even more English learning related content on Instagram, just search for the username "lelpodcast". Finally, if you have any questions, comments, critiques, or suggestions for songs, don't hesitate to send us a message to any of our social media accounts, or to our email address "[email protected]". We hope to hear from you soon!