Shave and a Haircut | Hacker News Reader

Shave and a Haircut

en.wikipedia.org

224 pointsbschne142 comments

A made a little “secret knock” authentication demo.

Shave and a haircut is obviously the secret knock used in the demo

https://miniatureape.github.io/prohibition/

(Nb: I’m sure this doesn’t work great on some devices)

Fun! Over a decade ago, my boss and I added a secret knock using Shave and a Haircut just like this to our wayfinder product, a large touchscreen app used on trade show floors.

It’s how we got into our admin to maintenance them at the shows and was useful if something was wrong with the onscreen keyboard (or we didn’t have our own keyboard to attach).

I used it for a silly credits screen in football trivia game - summer 2002 I could knock on the screen of a many pub trivia machine to make it show my name :)

It just always says scram no matter what I do, I can record a single knock and it will still say "scram". Latest Safari on latest macOS.

I couldn't get it to pass on my phone, but "scram"/"get out of here" is equivalent to a password rejected/401 response. A single knock does not match the expected pattern, so you would expect it to be rejected.

No, there is a recording function that is supposed to let us in (I think?), but I don't know how

I had an issue, but I figured it out. The rhythm is not the same as the one on the wikipedia page - which I was already familiar with. After looking at my recordings I realized I was playing it straight, but the default knock recording has a swing/triplet feel.

straight: DAA DA-DA DA DA, DA DA

swung: DAA DA D-DA DA, DA DA

I hope my highly rigorous notation is helpful here

edit - in hindsight this has nothing to do with your problem

I can't use it on Edge, I tap tap, record, tap tap, do everything I can, but its Scram every time

> The former prisoner of war and U.S. Navy seaman Doug Hegdahl reports fellow U.S. captives in the Vietnam War would authenticate a new prisoner's U.S. identity by using "Shave and a Haircut" as a shibboleth, tapping the first five notes against a cell wall and waiting for the appropriate response.

With the mass export of western culture, I wonder if there are any songs, tunes, or patterns like this that would still reliably work as a shibboleth.

I imagine they would have to be hyper-local at this point. You could authenticate someone from a major metropolis, maybe, but not likely the whole of the US.

The whole of the US would be hard since national level news and culture is what is getting exported, but local knowledge by state/region is a possible source. Like pronunciation of location names pronunciation (like pronunciation of Tilamuk Oregon, Miami Oklahoma, etc.), songs and chants for university sports teams, and jingles and phrases from local commercials.

Rock Chalk...

I enjoy watching recent Seattle arrivals attempt to pronounce Mukilteo, Sequim, and Sekiu.

I grew up in Long Island, New York, and there used to be a radio commercial for a local insurance company that bagged on national competitors for not being able to pronounce Ronkonkoma. Other local place names that were difficult for some to pronounce, mostly indigenous language derived, were Quogue, Patchogue, Cutchogue, Yaphank, Massapequa, Secatogue. If you can rattle those off in 1 or 2 seconds, and still throw in a four letter epithet, you can pass as a local. F'n Quogue.

Louisiana has a long list of place names like this. New Orleans street names alone have standard pronunciations, many of which are not obvious especially if you've seen the name in other contexts. Then there are the city names like Plaquemines, Natchitoches, and even New Orleans itself (if you say "new or-LEENZ" like Chuck Berry you will be immediately flagged as an outsider).

I reminded my wife of Natchitoches every time she complained about pronouncing Massachusetts place names like Leominster when we lived up north.

I grew up in New Orleans and now live in Seattle, and all of my intuition for pronunciation is just totally broken.

In many places, if you see a "weird" (as in non-English-seeming) place name, a reasonable pronunciation guess is to just assume it's from a Romance language and pronounce it vaguely Spanish/French-ish. This works because so many foreign names that are common in the US that aren't obviously Anglo/Germanic are from Spanish, French, or Italian immigrants.

New Orleans screws that all up, though, because it has such a complex intertwined cultural history. In New Orleans, place names often have a pronunciation that is explicitly weirder and sort of the opposite of phonetic. You mentioned "Natchitoches", which is pronounced locally like "Nackodish". There is no reasonable algorithm that would take as input the spelling of a place name in New Orleans and output its pronunciation.

So my usual algorithm for pronouncing an unfamiliar name is, "Guess that it's like a Romance language and if not assume it's completely weird and unrelated to the spelling."

But Native American-derived names in the Pacific Northwest often confound that. They don't have Romance vowels or emphasis at all (for obvious reasons). And the pronunciation often is very close to the spelling. (I assume that's because the spelling came along so much more recently here in the PNW than on the East and Gulf Coast, and hasn't had as much time to drift.)

My dumb algorithm for pronouncing PNW placenames is "Imagine an American who's never even heard of a European country much less visited one, and have them pronounce the name phonetically." And it works surprisingly well!

For example, "Mukilteo". If you try to throw some Romance flair onto it, you'd get "Muh-KILL-tey-o", which isn't right (but does sound charmingly exotic). It's anybody's guess how that would be pronounced if it were a street in New Orleans. Maybe "Mill-toe".

But if you imagine some hopelessly bored midwestern kid forced to read it out loud in school and not even trying to get it right and they'd go, "Muh-kill-TEE-oh" and... that's it.

Likewise, I kept wanting "Anacortez" to sound like some Spanish explorer "Anna CorTEZ". But, no, it's just "Anna-CORE-tiss". "Humptulips" is literally "hump tulips". "Chimacum" is "chim-uh-cum". "Snoqualmie" is "snow-quall-me". They all have the most vanilla-sounding pronunciation.

I admit that Sequim ("skwim") and Puyallup ("pyoo-A-lup") are weird.

> In many places, if you see a "weird" (as in non-English-seeming) place name, a reasonable pronunciation guess is to just assume it's from a Romance language

In New England at least you have three options: English, French (Canadian), or indigenous as mangled by a bunch of half-literate English or French speakers 200 years ago. As a result, it's never quite clear if you're dealing with vowels that went through the Great Vowel Shift that divides middle and modern English[0] or not.

[0] I am not a linguist, cunning or otherwise. This is an approximation.

Oh, I forgot Puyallup, good one. Without the state fair radio commercials I’d be lost. I DID pronounce it as “Muh-KILL-tey-o” on the first day that we moved there 20 years ago, but never again. And Sekiu being pronounced “C Q” seems like it may violate your pronunciation schema. :)

Worcester, which will have the advantage of letting us find any secret British.

The town in Ohio is literally spelled Wooster. I'm not sure what that says about us, but it certainly says something.

That's named for a Revolutionary War general, whose name was Wooster, like 1920s British character Bertie Wooster. There were 169 Wooster families in London in the 1891 UK census. I kind of doubt they all descended from the US, so what this says to me is that some British person filling out a form heard the name "Worcester" and very sensibly wrote Wooster.

Worcester is a corruption of Wigraceaster which is a corruption of Weorgoran Ceaster, so rigidly sticking to an orthodox spelling is ridiculous and it should be reformed. Like Featherstonehaugh turned into Fanshaw.

The pronunciation of Chili, NY is an immediate way to ID anyone from the Rochester area.

...of course it's pronounced "Chye-lie".

I can't talk, though, I come from Ohio where we have a city named "Versailles" that's pronounced "vur-SAYLES".

Illinois also has a Ver-Say-Lees as well as a Kay-row (Cairo)

Americans love French. It's their nitch. It probably comes from reading so much Nitchski.

> ...that's pronounced "vur-SAYLES"

Indiana has one too. I found this out when my wife kept using that pronunciation while touring the namesake French palace on our honeymoon.

Don’t forget Charlotte, NY (pronounced Shar-LOT).

Or Calais, VT is pronounced CAL-iss.

I once interviewed a candidate for an engineering position in Seattle. It quickly turned out that he had fabricated his entire work history and education. My first clue was that he claimed two years of work experience at Costco HQ in Issaquah, Washington but he pronounced it as "Is-ACK" (the local pronounciation is "IS-uh-kwah"). No one who spent two years in Issaquah would ever pronounce it that way, regardless of the accent you're coming from. His story just got weirder from there.

[1]: To this day I'm not sure why -- he actually performed quite well on the tech part of the interview and might have gotten an offer if he hadn't turned out to be so untrustworthy!

I'd say the Washington shibboleth should be "Puyallup"

I once met someone who lived in Seattle a couple years and said "Puget Sound" with a hard g

Or Snohomish. Or Sequim. Or Cle Elum.

...or Spokane. "Spo-cane" is one I've heard not infrequently.

TIL it's supposed to be "spoh-KAN".

Lake Keechelus

Enumclaw/EnumClaw?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100401-00/?p=14...

I still remember the Mariners commercial from decades ago where Edgar Martinez tries to reach new Latin American recruits to pronounce Puyallup. Hilarious.

Maybe he had a speech impediment.

I heard it in a jpop song, happy summer wedding by morning musume, about 20 years ago. They actually worked it into the melody of the song. I think they're well aware of it now in the East.

ive also heard using the question "who was mickey's old girlfriend?" referring to Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

Maybe 800-588-2-300?

I don’t know that one. Safari seems to have rendered it as a phone number, though. Which makes me wonder, you could probably use as a challenge: 867-5…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwJQQux0TF0

it is a phone number, Empire Carpets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwJQQux0TF0

Nice try ISIS.

The Pledge of Allegiance?

For the US, "where does the shortstop play" is a pretty good one. Some people might get through K-12 without learning that, but surely not many.

I don't give a damn!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_on_First%3F#Sketch

Well, that is who plays short stop.

The position is a different matter.

As if! (the shortstop cares)

Great bit, BTW. I loved it as a kid.

I'm an American and the best I could answer for that is "on the baseball field." I know it is a baseball position. Many other countries play baseball too. (Looked it up, oh I remember now, but wouldn't have been able to answer on demand.)

Wikipedia tells me "baseball is considered the most popular sport in parts of Central and South America, the Caribbean, and East Asia, particularly in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. "

I don't think there is such a shibboleth with both good precision and recall. American culture is exported around the world, but also is no longer a monoculture with only 3 broadcast networks. Any shibboleth that is ubiquitous enough in the US will be exported globally. Any part of US culture that is not global probably isn't as universal in the US.

Even basic US civics (which would be known by more educated people globally) is far from universal: Only 77% of Americans can link the first amendment to freedom of speech and only 83% can name even one of the three branches of the federal government. And that's of the population of Americans who agree to take a university run political knowledge survey (https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/political-commun...)

Agreed on the general diffusion of knowledge; I think it's probably a step in the right direction for various cultures to have some basic understanding of those with which they are not personally familiar. We Americans shouldn't count on the shortstop being a secret to the world, nor should we be willfully ignorant of things that are popularly known elsewhere.

Shibboleths, like all language, evolve. Some die off, become ineffective or unuseful. Others spring up. Does tiktok live here, now? I fear that I would fail a modern test, but I try to keep up.

During the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans infiltrated the American lines with ersatz officers sowing confusion by giving conflicting orders in perfect English.

The GIs hit on the idea of asking them baseball questions. Failing to answer them correctly got the fake officers shot on the spot.

My dad (WW2 vet) told me I would have been shot on the spot. My utter disinterest in baseball distressed him.

American love of baseball is absolutely a trope in WWII films. It was part of a recent "Masters Of The Air" episode where a German interrogator tried to establish rapport with a captured American flier by discussing the most recent World Series. It's like baseball was the only American sport during the 1930s and '40s.

I've been enjoying MotA. My only gripe is the crews laughing, talking and cheering about the target during the briefing. They didn't do that. They were terrified.

Maybe some TV ad jingle. I bet you could do just the rhythm of "give me a BREAK, GIVE me a break, BREAK me off a piece of that" and get three even knocks back as a response.

Football cream?

A British or Irish person might kick off with an approved weather discussion (appropriate with strangers, for the use of) opening gambit and await a sanctioned response.

Another option is "fork 'andles". The correct response is a repeat followed by childish giggling but the rubbish assumed accents are also part of the shibboleth. This one may be gradually dying out.

A final option is to surreptitiously start a queue.

Pretty sure you could identify anyone who grew up in New Zealand just by saying "Tutira mai nga iwi". You'd either get an almost immediate involuntary response from a kiwi or just confusion from anyone else.

Dueling Banjo’s is an equally recognizable call and response.

“Not happy…” (“Jan”) would probably work for most Aussies, as one of the most well-known but still local catchphrases.

Wow, so "two bits" is what Roger says in response to Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I can hear it now, but I never actually knew what was said.

I never understood that either. It only took me about 30 years to get the joke.

This is the funniest scene in the entire movie IMHO.

Roger's compulsive, uncontrollable need to respond with "Two Bits" kills me every time.

I've seen dozens of memes using the same gag but with a popular song or catch phrase.

Right. As a toon Roger can’t not respond. It’s how Doom forces him to reveal himself.

If you’re a Seinfeld fan, listen to how George knocks on the door in “The Butter Shave”. :)

Related: "na-na na-na na-na"

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/na-na_na-na_na-na

I always wondered if anyone else noticed, how the Jackson 5 smuggled it into ABC.

https://youtu.be/ho7796-au8U?t=01m24s

Have you heard it in Queen's "We are the champions"?

"No time for losers, for we are the Champions" ... etc

Queen has to be one of the winners in terms of shortness of the message required, you can probably get by with just a STOMP-STOMP

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I noticed that and asked a friend, and they didn't see it. To me, when you consider both how it sounds and the theme of the song, it has to be intentional.

In French it's "na-na na-na nère"

“Batman!”

No, Batman is an ostinative "Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na". Completely different from the melodic "na-na na-na na-na".

What we really need is a "na na" railroad diagram [0]

  (na na)+ [two bits|Batman!|(hey ){3} goodbye]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax_diagram

Principal Ed Rooney gives the finger and two bits in Ferris Bueller's Day Off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li_jp3mYXLA

When I was in high school jazz band, there was a similar lick that came at the end of a lot of songs "what makes your big head so hard".

Presumably it originally came from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldonia. However, I'm having trouble finding references to it's use as a riff/lick. So maybe it was something that was specific to our band?

Edit: An example of this lick would be the end of the Beatle's "I want to hold your hand": https://youtu.be/v1HDt1tknTc?t=137

I've been playing Beyond All Reason (an open-source RTS) lately, and noticed that if I want to build a handful of some unit, I'd unconsciously click five times in a "shave and a haircut" pattern.

Wow, so this is the where Nardwuar's "Doot doola doot do..." comes from! I always wondered how it was so ubiquitous that even people unfamiliar with his interviews knew how to respond. Very interesting.

I was thinking the same!

I’m interested in learning where you’re from—I’d assume outside of North America/Western Europe? I take familiarity with it so much for granted that it’s fascinating that someone’s familiarity with it comes from Narduwar.

I am from North America actually, I’m curious where your association with it comes from. I just spend a lot of time on youtube/listening to hip hop so have heard Nardwuar do it many times. I’m vaguely familiar with it otherwise too, but wouldn’t be able to place it anywhere.

I’m American.

It was in the movie Roger Rabbit, which came out when I was 5 (40 now). And I know I knew it then.

I assume I learned it from looney tunes or some other cartoon. But it was ubiquitous enough everyone knew it. To me it feels a little bit like asking how you know who Superman is. It’s just too engrained.

For Nardwuar fans (and those who've never heard of him), this talk is amazing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26678512

He is 100/100 for initiative. Surprisingly relevant to HN'er folks like ourselves.

Thank you so much for sharing this! I had never heard of this incredible human, and I feel so inspired now that I do.

Serendipitous connections like this are what make HN so magical for me, so I thought my appreciation warranted more than just an upvote :D

> "Two bits" is a term in the United States and Canada for 25 cents

I don't know about Canada, but the "is" should be a "was" unless there are contexts I don't know about.

It did lead me down a little deeper the Wikipedia rabbit hole, and apparently:

> The New York Stock Exchange continued to list stock prices in $1⁄8 until June 24, 1997, at which time it started listing in $1⁄16. It did not fully implement decimal listing until January 29, 2001.

That's crazy to imagine we're less than 25 years away from the decimalization of the NYSE.

Eight bits in a (modern) byte, eight bits in a buck. I wonder if there was a conscious or subconscious correction by the team designing the IBM 360 to align with the existing “standard.”

seems hard to pin down exactly, but in this Computerphile interview the gist seems to be "if you get to the point where you want a distinct code for upper- and lowercase characters, digits, and a few punctuation symbols, you land a little north of six bits, an odd number of bits would be annoying to implement in hardware, so let's go for eight."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuScajG_FuI&t=184s

I wonder when a bit of memory crossed over a bit of money. Pretty early I guess.

In other tunes it was bay rum instead of two bits.

2 bit is still used in Canada as an indicator of something less than good, otherwise unused.

I've definitely heard expressions that go something like, "Why you no-good, two-bit etc etc!", and never connected that to this until now.

Me neither! I always tentatively assumed it's about computer bits, where two bits would be "not much", and that somehow it entered into normie vernacular.

So, TIL that this is another case of society and culture in the 19th and 20th century US evolving primarily around the stock exchange :o.

TIL Yosemite Sam was the rootinest, tootinest computer geek this side of the Pecos.

And of course bytes are divided into eight bits - but that's just a coincidence, because bits came first and byte sizes weren't standardized until the 1970s.

I suspect that "bit" for binary digit and "bit" as in "two bits" is a deliberate convergence more than pure coincidence. Tukey coined the term right after the war, which is a cultural high water mark for the term two bits. It doesn't hurt that "a bit" also means the least of something one might reasonably consider, this is where the bit as a sliver of the Spanish Dollar comes from in the first place, eight pieces being about as small as it was feasible to divide the coin into. Hence two bits for the quarter.

I grew up on the US hearing this usage, but it was primarily in Looney Tunes.

Same in the US, but I can't imagine anyone would be able to accurately pinpoint its etymology.

Surprised to hear that, I would have guessed folks over 40 would be accustomed to "2-bit wh*re" - my dad used to scream that all the time about his personal banker "god damn that man he's a f'ing 2 bit wh..." - pretty sure my grandpa used it regularly also. Maybe my family are not the most refined of people. ;)

Back in the 90s, the anti-Microsoft movement had a slogan that went something like: "Windows: a 32-bit layer on top of a 16-bit operating system originally for an 8-bit CPU derived from a 4-bit microcontroller, by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition."

Likewise, high school football cheerleaders '2 bits, 4 bits, 6 bits a dollar all for XXXXX stand up and holler"

I was familiar with this as a high schooler but it never occurred to me that 2 bits was 1/4 of a dollar. It was like a nursery rhyme where you don't really think about what the words actually mean.

In the US it would still be fairly common for someone to know that "two bits" can mean a quarter, but it's not used much in common conversation.

I don't know if this is just me, but I particularly associate it with a purposely colloquial or "old timey" register of speech. In my head I can envision a carny with a Foghorn Leghorn accent selling me a ticket to the Ferris wheel, "That'll be two bits, son".

I'm nearly 40 and spent most of my life in the northern midwest. Never heard "two bits" before.

Fun fact: The quarter being worth two bits is part of the same "split a dollar up into eights" system that resulted in Spanish dollars being called a "pieces of eight".

A Spanish dollar was worth eight Spanish reals. So a quarter of a dollar would be worth two Spanish reals; hence two bits. Presumably the terminology stuck around even after the switch to US dollars.

Wow, this is very interesting. In Mexico, it's used to insult another person. I always thought it was a Mexico-thing.

For those wondering, this is explained in the section "Uses in other countries".

This always trips me up when I enthusiastically knock on my friends door to this tune. Oops

regarding “bits” as a monetary term: it took me a solid decade to get the joke in “Making Money” regarding why Reacher Gilt taught his parrot to say “12.5%”

For those who don't get it, it's a reference to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island which features a parrot that repeats "Pieces of Eight" (also known as a bit).

If your bird repeats "Pieces of Seven" you should check its settings; it might have a parroty error.

slow clap

https://wiki.lspace.org/Main_Page Is a great resource for this; so many of the books have deep or obscure British jokes that even Native English (simplified) ((American)) don’t get.

I was thinking of a different Pratchett joke: in Making Money, Moist is told to use the barber's knock: "shave and a haircut, no legs!"

I'm rereading the Moist series again, and it is so incredibly thick with humour and references. I mean, all of the books are, but that series really feels like him at the top of his game.

"the smoking GNU"

Interestingly Wikipedia says the Morse version of it is

  Morse code "dah-di-di-dah-di, dah-dit" ( –··–·   –· )

IMHO more common is to send "ESE" (. ... .) - and the other station replies "EE" (. .)

https://lcwo.net/ext/player?z=MjR%2BfjIwfn42MDB%2BfkVTRSBFRQ...

"ESE" is a popular Amateur radio call-sign suffix among Morse enthusiasts for that reason.

I like the variation where the note for "hair" is played a half step flat.

In the example on the wikipedia page, the implied chords for "shave and a hair- cut" would be

(original)

    G      /   .   C      G
    shave  and a   hair  cut

(variation)

    G      /   .   Eb7   D7
    shave  and a   hair  cut

It's used unironically/noncomedically as a final banjo lick in many bluegrass picking songs (the article does mention this). I heard it first there and I've always assumed it originated from American folk music. Interesting that it's quite a bit older/more general.

Sounds like it comes from a minstrel show so it’s definitely American folk.

Two bits meaning 25 cents came from an early practice of cutting a Spanish silver dollar into 8 pieces with four cuts.

That's also where "piece of eight" as a reference to the Spanish dollar comes from.

There's a common workflow I use at work that involves taking the default 10 times before inputting what I need to use. I do double shave and a haircut quickly instead of counting return presses.

I have an unintended variation on that...

Once a day, I have to press a button on my kitchen scale 4 times, to switch it from grams to fl.oz.

It seems that the the fastest tempo at which one can press the button 4 times... matches the "1-2-3-4" at the start of the song people might know from "JK Wedding Entrance Dance". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0

(I have a different association with the sequence 4-3-2-1, reminding me of the Peter Schilling song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO0A0XcWy88&t=41s )

In the survival/extraction/horror game Escape From Tarkov, this rhythm is used to signal "friendly" when there's no other means of communication.

Clapping the rhythm of the "challenge" part can be very effective in getting the attention of a group of distracted people that you want to address. It’s so well known that almost anyone instinctually claps the response when they hear the challenge. As a sharp percussive sound, clapping is also readily audible over chatter.

The Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps ended many of their segments in the 80s with "Watch out for that tree" rhythm from the George of the Jungle theme. Seen here[1] around 10:20 to 10:22.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlYOBu9CzNI&t=618s

The famous Roger Rabbit moment cued up:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/6ds6w7SkHyw?&start=54&end=62

If you do the ending pattern 8 times it becomes “shave and a haircut, two bytes”

When I knock on a door, I either use this tune, or the first 7 notes of Super Mario Bros.

Weird to know some US peeps don't know it!

Tangentially, I didn't realise that the Spanish peso was the first global currency and was used in the U.S.

Bit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_(money)

Are there other rhythms that can convey the same or more information in fewer knocks?

I would argue that three knocks at regular (quick) intervals is the minimum to convey "there's someone at the door" rather than "something fell down in the other room".

There's a tune that's very similar to "Shave and a Haircut", but in a minor key, replacing the two eights with a triplet and a chromatic part. (Notes are: G D Db D Eb D; F# G) Does anyone know what its called?

If you scroll down to the section "Uses in other countries", there's the same tune that seems to be in minor.

In Australia, that's when the song ends with 'brown bread' (dead). I assume it's British.

It's rather striking that a dollar today is worth considerably less than a penny when this was written, at least with respect to grooming services.

It’s even more striking once you look into the history of money, and realize what’s going on.

End the Fed.

i have a little IOT device[0] which has a starting animation with LEDS when you reset it. i used that tune for the LED animation (without sound) just the timings. funny enough i never knew where it came from just that it was in my head and always associated with looney tunes. Finally i know its origin :)

[0] https://notific.at

im chronically horrific when it comes to interpreting lyrics correctly. ever since ive been small up to present day. for example rage against the machine 'wearing your badge and your trophy wife'

always thought this was 'shave and a haircut, to be.'

my solution has been to just give up on words in songs altogether.

This has to be near the top of the list of things people “know of”, but don’t have a word/phrase for.

How many catchy tunes would fit that exact pattern?

I always thought it was "match in a gas-tank...to bits!"

QUE: ROGER RABBIT STAGE RIGHT

[SCREAMS]

TWO BITS!

… two bits!

See also: “The stars at night are big and bright…”

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