The Influence Of Popular Music

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Popular music is readily available everywhere, such as on the radio, the media, and online. Artists often make use of their creativity by adding in some unique and creative lyrics that contain words that we haven’t heard often or even before. As a result, popular music affects our everyday speech; certain words and phrases from its lyrics integrating themselves into our language. Bryson says that some of the ways we adopt and make up new words is by “adding to them, by subtracting from them, by making them up, and by doing nothing to them” (811) as well as by “borrowing them from other languages and creating them by mistake” (811). Popular music follows the same pathway that Bryson presented into our ears and out of our mouths. Popular music …show more content…

We mishear words words often in our daily language. Bryon says that “many other words owe their existence to mishearings. Button hole was once buttonhold. Sweetheart was originally sweetard, as in dullard and dotard” (811). For a long time, people believed that was the real way of saying the word, because they heard others say it. In Taylor Swift’s song, “Blank Space”, most people misheard “got a long list of ex lovers” as “all the lonely starbucks lovers” for a long time, until they looked up the song and realized the actual lyrics. Now it has become a popular inside joke phrase that even Taylor Swift acknowledges. A study published in January 2014 reports that when we mishear lyrics, we hear what the singer is singing, but our own brains change and interpret what we hear based on our own experiences (Hutchison). Many people can scoff at the notion that popular music “lingo” can affect how we speak our language. They could say that popular music speech dies out and that it is a bad influence to us because most of what we experience as pop talks about sex and partying. But popular music helps to enhance our language, rather than dirtify it. It gives us new ways of saying a word or describing something. It gives us more versatility in

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