Several VC readers responded to my post about the hook
Everybody does what they do best the best
in a children’s song (“The Mighty Worm,” on Ralph’s World: Peggy’s Pie Parlor). Maestro and Russ Petti noted the existence of a reasonable, non-tautologous, fifth reading of the line. It’s that whatever activity is your personal best, that’s the one that you tend to work hardest and most enthusiastically at, and do to the best of your abilities.
If this reading is available in Ralph Covert’s mental grammar, then I’d agree that it’s probably the meaning he intended. However, I can’t get that meaning from the way the line is phrased. For me to get that reading, such that when you’re doing your personal-best activity, you always do a full-assed job and not a half-assed one, the line would have to be phrased like this:
Everybody does THEIR best at what they do THE best.
Meanwhile, VC reader Barry Jacobs has a slightly different take on Maestro’s and Petti’s interpretation. He says:
Apropos your post … referencing Ralph’s World: it seems to me that Ralph has slyly been teaching your kids basic economic theory. To wit, the theory of comparative advantage states that optimal productive effeciency (call this “Efficiency Best” or EB) is attained when everyone engages in the activity in which he has a comparative advantage (call this “Comparative Best” or CB). As David Ricardo illustrated in his famous (to economists) mathematical example, a person’s CB activity need not be one in which he is Better Than Everyone Else (“BTEE” in your terms), but rather, is simply that activity that maximizes the value of his time.
Indeed, it is entirely possible that a person who has a choice between a low-value activity that’s his PB and maybe even his BTEE (say, for example, sending emails to Conspirators) and a high-value activity that he’s only mediocre at (like studying for his bar exam) might well “best” do what he personally does worst, but comparatively does best. To give another example, my doctor told me the other day that he won the “employee of the month” award seven months running at the McDonald’s he worked at in high school. I’ll be he still flips a mean burger…. But face it, our economy can get by better without a super-keen fry cook than it can without even a mediocre doctor.
So, an appropriate exegesis of Ralph’s song should go something like this:
Everybody does most efficiently what they [sic] have the greatest comparative advantage in doing.
It loses something in the translation, though, doesn’t it?
The only flaw I see is that the only two ways I personally can interpret the phrase the best after a verb is the Personal Best and BTEE readings I discussed before, and I think just about all other English speakers are the same way. Is there anyone out there who gets the PB, BTEE and CB readings?
BTW, if you like hearing about economic principles applied to strange topics like the lyrics in kids’ songs, you’ll probably get a kick out of the kind of stuff my brother talks about here and here.
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