The Irish singer Van Morrison was well into his set at a
concert in his native isle before a crowd in high spirits. Enthusiastic
applause followed every song. At one point in the excited hubbub as Van tried
to signal the band to start a new song, a voice yelled out over the crowd,
"We love you, Van!". This moved the dour and laconic performer to
make his only remark of the evening to his audience. Said Van emphatically to
his adoringly ebullient fan: "Fucking shut the fuck up."My friend Jim McCloskey, the Irish syntactician (in both senses
of that phrase) told me this story. He was present at the concert and reported
the event. He is a great Van Morrison fan, and I think he views the incident as
just a disarmingly inappropriate verbal symptom of Van the Man's well-known
shyness and stage fright. I like the story too, but on a less sympathetic
basis: I happen to detest Van Morrison's music. His bare, strained voice
appeals to me not at all, and I hate even his most popular recordings. (I once
offered to put five dollars in the tips jar at the Stevenson College Coffee
House at UC Santa Cruz if they would stop playing the Van Morrison CD they had
put on. They did, and I did. So his music has negative cash value for me: I
have actually paid money to not hear it.) For me the story is about a
foul-mouthed verbal indication that the curmudgeonly Celtic soulster is as
gratingly unpleasant to his public as his music is to my ears. But no matter.
Never mind the man or his music. We are here to try to learn what we can from
the syntax of the interesting expression he used.