"He was a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater."

I'd always assumed that this meant that he was one-eyed, one-horned, flying, and ate purple people.

But somebody just pointed out to me that the line could be interpreted to mean that he's one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple, and eats people in general. In which case none of us would be safe around him!

So which is it?

This makes me wonder what other songs have lyrics open to this sort of misinterpretation.

This is why punctuation is so important. Me, I think he's purple and eats people.

The way this is punctuated, it means he only eats flying purple people, as without further commas, both flying and purple become modifiers of the last adjective (people) before the object (eater)

Of course, that would make sense, as after the 100 years war, there weren't enough flying purple people, and the unfortunate eaters when extinct as cannons replaced people flinging catapults as the major artillery on the battlefield.

As a child, I always thought the monster was big and purple, and ate people, but we make strange things cute to kids. Same thing goes for that big nasty lizard that lives in Honalee - damn monstrous beast it was.

Although the first verse suggests that the creature him/itself is purple...



...the song explicitly states that the creature eats purple people in one of the later verses, so he/it is no threat to anyone who's not purple.



He/It is also described as "Pigeon-toed, under growed" and essentially harmless despite being weird looking.

There'd be a multitude of songs, I think, which are open to (mis)interpretation. Given the prevalence of double entendre and the often cryptic use of slang in many songs I think there'd be a massive number of examples.

My favourite example of it is Plastic Bertrand's 1977 song Ca Plane Pour Moi.



The lyrics, in Belgian French, were deliberately nonsensical and featured slang phrases so any translation into English makes even less sense. When I was a kid at school, the lyrics were supposed to mean all kinds of stuff and I can remember people speculating it about on TV, etc. I concluded even as a kid that nobody actually knew what the words meant and forgot about it...until the internet appeared.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Engli ... c-Bertrand

That article explains - to some degree - what the song is on about (which isn't much as it turns out). It's always been one of those things that stuck in my mind because of how huge that song was when I was little.

Besides Sheb Wooley, have any cryptid hunters ever gotten a lead on the Flying Purple People Eater? Anybody who ever got a photo of that one would really get his name in the papers!

When I was young, there was one of those K-Tel commercials that included this song, and it had a cartoon image of a purple monster flying along. So I always heard it as the monster being purple.

This is like the Scorcher debate all over again. We'll end up with the Purples and the Non-Purples...

I think the monster is purple and also eats purple people; I'm bridging the theoretical divide.

The lyric about explicitly eating purple people surely sorts this out though. Creator intent, people.

And were the polka dots on the bikini yellow, or was the background fabric of the bikini yellow?

Background fabric was yellow, polka dots were some other colour. It's open to interpretation, yes, but that's how the lyrics sound/read to me.

Are there other opinions or is this the consensus?

But it says yellow, then polka dot, then bikini.

Yes but the order of those words also implies that the bikini was yellow, the polka dots being secondary to the base colour (yellow). Since yellow is mentioned first, I read that as being the base colour.

It could be interpreted the other way, but the more I consider it the more convinced I am that I'm correct.

Yes. Though I suppose there's nothing to say that the Purple People Eater can't also be purple himself.

So the monster is purple.

Yes he's purple...and he eats purple people. I stated this hypothesis earlier.

If he/it wasn't purple, then Sheb would have no reason to describe him/it as a purple people eater when he originally describes the creature in the first verse.

In the bikini example, the word order suggests that the garment's base colour is yellow.

Could be yeller polky dots.

That is one interpretation. It's a matter of opinion. In my view, since yellow is mentioned first it must logically be the base colour. There's no "with" in there so you may be correct.

I err on the side of a yellow bikini with polka dots of a different hue, though.

Was the bikini teeny-weeny, or were the polka dots teeny-weeny?

Is it:

♫ But if this ever-changing world in which we live in... ♪

or

♫ But if this ever-changing world in which we're livin'... ♪

I once had one of these things...

As in the purple people eater example; it's both.



The second one. The first one makes no sense and is often mistakenly "heard" by the same kind of people who "hear" 'Tony Danza' instead of 'Tiny Dancer'.

The bikini itself was and very small and yellow ; but the polka-dots were