• It is known [3] that almost all songs of length n require a text of length ~ n — here the reference [3] is not a reference to the musical literature as one might expect, but a reference to Chaitin! This is similar to Kolmogorov complexity, “almost all real numbers are uncomputable / undefinable”, etc. :-)
• By the Distributive Law and the Commutative Law [4], we have — a reference to Chrystal, the standard algebra textbook of the 19th century. (See also Underwood Dudley's “What is Mathematics For?”)
• possible to generalize this lemma [...] provided that the sequence <V_k> satisfies a certain smoothness condition. Details will appear in a future paper — typical papers (and of course even the author knows there will no future paper) :-) Cf. Polya's “cheap” generalization.
• The coefficient of √n was further improved by a Scottish farmer named O. MacDonald — even when making a joke, he has a serious reference to Kennedy's book on folk songs, giving the page number where other farmyard songs are discussed. In fact the entire list of references is rather scholarly.
• R₁ = ‘Ee-igh, ’² ‘oh! ’ — the ² here is not a footnote, but “square”, i.e. the string repeated two times
• The whole proof of Lemma 2 is a wonderful (and educational) formalization of the song
• Therefore if MacDonald's farm animals ultimately have long names they should make slightly shorter noises.
• A fundamental improvement was claimed in England in 1824, when the true love of U. Jack gave to him a total of 12 ladies dancing, 22 lords a-leaping, 30 drummers drumming, [...] during the twelve days of Christmas [11] — the reference [11] is a reference to a MoMA artwork, see https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ben-shahn-titled-book...
• (see [7]) — the [7] here is a faux reference; it reads ”U. Jack, "Logarithmic growth of verses," Acta Perdix 15 (1826), 1-65535” and apart from “U. Jack” and the number of pages, note that “Perdix” = partridge
• J. W. Blatz of Milwaukee, Wisconsin who first discovered a class of songs known as "m Bottles of Beer on the Wall"; her elegant construction... — Knuth is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and J. W. Blatz is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Blatz_Brewing_Company
• the song "I'll drink m if you'll drink m + 1." However, the English start at m = 1 and get no higher than m = 9, possibly because they actually drink the beer instead of allowing the bottles to fall.
• all practical requirements for song generation with limited memory space. In fact, 99 bottles of beer usually seemed to be more than sufficient in most cases.
• However, the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory, and the ultimate improvement of Theorem 1 has consequently just been announced
• [Well you should just read it]
• Acknowledgment. I wish to thank J. M. Knuth and J. S. Knuth for suggesting the topic of this paper. — finally giving away the reason for the existence of this article: these are his children; they were probably 12 and 10 at the time.