Run

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a pen scratching, a library clock, a very long sigh)
The Oxford English Dictionary. The verb "run." One lexicographer. Nine months.

[Verse 1]
Everybody assumes it's "set." It used to be "set," it isn't anymore.
It's "run," and it has, depending how you count them, six hundred senses,
and one man, Peter Gilliver, spent nine months on that single entry,
nine months, full time, on one word, and the word is RUN,
which you have used four times today without thinking about it once,
and which, when you look at it properly, refuses to hold still.

[Chorus]
A river runs! A nose runs! A car runs! A play runs!
You run a business, run a bath, run a risk, run a fever!
Stockings run! Colours run! Time runs OUT and machines run ON!
You run for office, run in the family, run someone through!
RUN! Six hundred meanings! One syllable! Three letters!
Nine months of a man's life and he says it's not finished!

[Verse 2]
And that's the joke about dictionaries that nobody tells properly:
they are not describing a language, they are chasing one,
and the chase does not end, and cannot end, and they know it,
and every entry is a photograph of something that has already moved,
and the OED has been revising since eighteen fifty-seven
and has never once been finished and never will be.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And I think that's the whole record, actually. That's what all of this is.
Napoleon and the rabbits. The bear who carried the shells.
The corpse on trial. The bell that only ever rang for settling earth.
Somebody wrote all of it down, in an entry, in a ledger, in a minute-book,
and the reason we can sing about any of it is that somebody FILED it,
and filing is a heroic act, and nobody ever says so.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the pen stops. The clock keeps going.)
Nine months. On "run."
He'd do it again. You can tell.