Small bone to pick..

..with Mr. Jason Mraz.  There's a line in "I'm Yours" where he says, "it's your God-forsaken right to be loved..."

I think what he actually means is "God-given."  I mean, why would God forsake (M-W: To renounce or turn away from entirely) one's right to be loved?  That doesn't sound like something God would do.  So either Mr. Mraz needs to brush up on his English-language idioms, or he has a very peculiar and twisted notion of God.  -______-
9 responses
nice catch. listened to that song a million times, never noticed that.
I like your thinking, but I don't see the same parallelism that you do. 'God-forsaken' is an epithet, like
'goddam'; 'God-given' is just another adjective phrase.
He changed the lyrics on that line when he sang it on SNL a couple weeks ago to "God Intended". I kind of liked God Forsaken though.
Well actually, that line always made perfect sense to me emotionally. The meaning is not expressed in linear, linguistically correct form, but rather comes to the fore in a more visceral abstract way: to wit, something like "we have been forsaken by God (insofar as the Judeo-Christian God is a tired old myth) but we still deserve to be loved the way He did, dammit."
Well said.  A little bit of anger in a little song about love.
Hah hah ha ... nice, Stephanie.
i honestly think he messed up the lyrics...otherwise he would probably stress that in his song. either that or "forsaken" fit with the song at that point, more so than "given". His statement would literally mean that the right to be loved is "without God", so either this is a humanist/atheist talking, or he messed up his words.
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