Moody River
More deadly than the vainest knife.

Twixt 12 and 20

Remember you're mine.

Moody River
More deadly than the vainest knife.

Remember you're mine.

This strikes me as funny in the sense of peculiar (not necessarily "Ha-ha funny"). That's because I never heard of a dog having just one puppy at a time. Don't they most always have considerable litters of puppies at a time? Incidentally there is a site called iusedtobelieve.com on which people post their mistaken childhood beliefs. One of the most common beliefs thereon is that dogs are males and cats are females of the same species. So sometimes or others children must have reacted to this line with "What? Dogs don't have puppies! Cats have kittens AND puppies!"

Trading stamps were something that were a household word from sometime after their first appearances in the 1920s up through the 1970s or so. But by the 1980s they were dying out. One of the best known brands of trading stamps in their day were H&S Green Stamps, probably referred to in the "green stamps" reference here. But H&S Green Stamps were discontinued by the late 1980s. When the song came out in the 1060s, hearers would have generally recognized the reference as something very familiar. But today's younger set could hear this song and often have no idea of what was being referred to. In their day, trading stamps were something that grocery stores and other business gave out to customers, the number of stamps being proportional to the amount of a purchase. Those who collected such stamps would paste them into books provided. When collectors thereof filled enough books, they were redeemable for merchandise at the stamp company's stores. One friend has told me how his mother once redeemed about three books of trading stamps for a pair of hair clippers. He had seen in the catalogue how other products could be obtained in exchange for various numbers of books of such stamps. He had his hopes set on a movie projector in the catalogue which could be obtained for somewhere between ten and twenty books of stamps, as he best remembered. He hoped to someday save enough of the stamps to get his movie projector, but never did.

The word "thee" is part of archaic English, as in, for example, the English of the King James Version of the Bible. It is therefore ironic that the usage of "thee" would get so muddled and sometimes outright wrong in a song sung by a Christian icon who goes back to a time when the King James Version was still a more predominantly used English Bible version than it is today. In such archaic English, "thee" was a more informal counterpart to "you" when that kind of English was current, corresponding to "informal' counterparts still preserved in a lot of other languages (for example in French the informal "te", versus the formal "vous", in Spanish the informal "te", versus the formal "Usted", and in German the informal "dich", versus the formal "Sie"). In the lyrics above, "thee" is twice correctly used, in the title phrase "thee I love", and also in the phrase "to kiss thee". But even so there is a catch involving the usage in the next to last line above of "your" in addressing the same person also addressed as "thee". The use of both the informal thee / thou / thy and the formal you / your were not correctly applied to the same person at anywhere near the same time. The informal might be applied to a child and the formal pronouns applied to the same person layer as a grownup, but variations between formal and informal would never correctly apply to the same addressee so close together in time, like here in the same song. But the most glaring grammatical absurdity here is the use of "thee" as if it were a nominative pronoun, since it is actually an objective pronoun. That could make this song seem like a self-parody. The correct nominative counterpart is "thou" as alluded to above. The phrases "Thee is mine" and "Thee pleasures me" are outright crass. The former is as absurd as saying "me am" instead of "I am" or "her is" instead of "she is" to "us are" instead of "we are". So to make all the grammar and usage consistent with the two otherwise correct occurrences of "thee" (in "thee I love" and "to kiss thee"), "Thee is mine" would need to corrected to "Thou art mine", "Thee pleasures me" would need to be corrected to "Thou pleasurest me" and "your bonnet, your cape, and your glove" would need to be changed to "thy bonnet, thy cape, and thy glove".