h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

When You Sleep - Paddy Kelly
When You Smile - Flaming Lips, The
When You Spoke My Name - MercyMe
When You Tell Me That You Love Me - Julio Iglesias
When You Think About Me - Billy Crawford
When You Told Me You Loved Me - Jessica Simpson
When You Took Your Love Away - Crystal Bernard
When You Wake - Beth Orton
When You Wake Up Feeling Old - Wilco
When You Walk Away - Cher
When You Walked Into My Life - Lila McCann
When You Wanna Come - Brian McKnight
When You Were A Child - Kinks
When You Were Loving Me - Kenny Rogers
When You Were Mine - Prince
When You Were My Baby - Magnetic Fields
When You Were Young - Del Amitri
When You Wish Upon A Star - Disney
When You're A Free Man - Moody Blues
When You're a Gee - Dj Quik
When You're A Man On Your Own - George Strait
When You're Alone - Bruce Springsteen
When You're Around - Relient K
When You're Away - Letter Kills
When You're Beautiful - By Heart
When You're Big - Kim Possible
When You're Coming Back - Karl Martindahl
When You're Falling - Peter Gabriel
When You're Gone - Bryan Adams
When You're Good To Mama - Chicago
When You're Hot You're Hot - Jerry Reed
When You're In Love - The Proclaimers
When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman - Conway Twitty
When You're In Love With Someone - Billy Crawford
When You're In Prison - Offspring
When You're Lonely - Jordan Knight
When You're Looking Like That - Westlife
When You're Not Trying To - Reba McEntire
When You're Old And Lonely - Magnetic Fields
When You're On Top - Wallflowers
When You're Poor - Loretta Lynn
When You're Sinking - Shaye
When You're Smiling - Louis Armstrong
When You're Thrown - The Thermals
When Your Arms Were Around - John Michael Montgomery
When Your Baby Ain't Around - John Michael Montgomery
When Your Body Gets Weak - Babyface
When You're Evil - Voltaire
When Your Eyes Say It - Britney Spears
When Your Hair Has Turned to Silver - Eddy Arnold
When Your Heart Goes (Woo, Woo, Woo) - Sawyer Brown
When Your Heart Is Connected - Starmaker
When Your Heart Is Weak (Dance Mix) - Cock Robin
When Your House Is Not a Home - Patsy Cline
When Your Life Was Low - Bette Midler
When Your Love Is Gone - Jimmy Barnes
When Your Love Is Too Far - C 21
When Your Love Was Mine - Marty Robbins
When Your Lover Has Gone - Carly Simon
When You Are Old And Grey - Tom Lehrer
When Your Spirit Gets Weak - Plus One
When Your Walls Come Down - Kiss
When Your World Stops Turning - Eddy Arnold
When Your World Was Turning for Me - Randy Travis
When You're Young - Jam
When You´re Comming Back - Fame Factory
When You´re Gone - Eric Clapton
Whenever I Breath Out-Positive Negative - Modest Mouse
Whenever You Close Your Eyes - Sandy & Junior
Whenever You Come Around - Vince Gill
Whenever You Need Me - Nick Cannon

Yes I cheated: http://www.LetsSingIt.com

Decent of you to reveal from whence those quotations came.

Out of my own music collection I found about 10 future-based 'when' song titles, and 5 referring to the past. Timewise, they seemed roughly matched with the temporal profile of my collection.

I'm sure there would be many more songs with 'when' somewhere in the lyrics.

Lordy the Reclining Man may have cheated a bit but in showing us only the "When You" and "When You're" lists - and a few of the "Whenevers" - he demonstrates how many more "When"s there must be. There's "When She"s and "When He"s and "When It's Springtime in Alaska".
http://www.LetsSingIt.com
I find this bounty a source of great relief because I was really starting to think we had all given up on the future and were losing touch with our fondest memories of times and things and people past.

In retrospect, and in light of these lists I realise now how silly I am to let these things get to me. I was damned near convinced that hope was no longer even a spring ritual and that no one made conditional propositions anymore. Please excuse my faux-apocalyptic, post-millenium brain fart on the question of 'wenn'.


The whole question of "When" of course is about 'time'.

And not just because there is a new Dr Who in our very near future, I have of late been transfixed on the paranoid idea that our media are keeping us stuck in some ongoing and eternal present tense. A culture living a constant now, continually asking ourselves 'What IS happening.'

If we allow the media to do that to our concsiousness they can control how we see the future (thru sci-fi programming) and also choose what memories we shall recall and what will be forgotten.



The only new one I could remember was "When the Red Red Robin comes bob-bob-bobbing along, There'll be no more sorrow as we go singing along, hoorah! Wake up! Wake up you sleepy heads. C'mon, c'mon get outa bed... live, love, laugh and be happy. There'll be no more crying when he comes flying along. When the Red Red Robin comes singing his strange sweet song."


~jwf~

Most of the many thousands of lifts in Hong Kong carry the injunction:"When there is a fire do not use this lift"

The lifts in my building have this message:

Caution
in the event of an emergency
Do not use this lift

The first two lines are in black on yellow. The third is in white on red. Punctuate that if you can.

Wonders if when a fire breaks out everyone swaps lifts to avoid travelling in THIS lift.

Mind you, the cabinets in the computer room all have a sign "This cabinet is fitted with a duel supply".

... and pistols?

<>

A very interesting train of thought, jwf...

I'm getting increasingly irritated by the use of the present tense in history programmes.

EG - "Hitler decides that the time is now ripe to seize power." Shit, really? NOW? Isn't there anything we can do about it?

Public information posters are obviously not written by linguistic experts. The amount of misspellings, poor punctutation & clumsy construction is appalling.

It's not the present tense. It's the storytelling past - equivalent to the past historic in French - which is confined to special circumstances such as books, TV documentaries, reports of football matches and jokes:

'So, 'e crosses it to Rooney 'oo slams it past the goalie'
'A piece of string walks into a bar...'

It's not a recent usage. It's been around for donkey's years. Resemblance to the present tense is purely coincidental.


>>The lifts in my building...

A few years ago, there was a fire in a Glasgow bus garage. Strathclyde Transport had to hurriedly find some spare buses from other places. They found a few from Dundee which, unlike the Glasgow variety, had exit doors halfway down the middle. These doors were labeled: "This is not a door." It always remined me of Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe".





(And speaking of exits: When you travel to Greece, do you ever find yourself automatically humming a Bob Marley song in the airport arrivals hall? I always do.)

Reminds me of a sign on a railway in England:

In the event of fire, please alight.

That's an interesting topic too...the inappropriate use of sesquipedalia in public service announcements:

'Customers of this service are informed that due to a mechanical fault in this unit they are requested to alight at the forthcoming point of departure'.

(The train's broken. You'll have to get off at the next stop.)

There's a new road being built near me. At a temporary roundabout there's a sign that says 'Caution! Adverse Camber!' I'd say that even many native English speakers would have difficulty decoding this in time to avoid spinning off the road.

The Irish language tends to be more direct. A Polling Station in Irish is "Ionad Votála" which translates literally as "voting place".

Isn't the narrative tense in English the simple "he walked, he did..."?
In what way is the narrative tense different from the storytelling past?

Actually going by your examples Edward, the answer to my question is that one is a colloquial way people describe something to their mates in the pub for instance, and the other is more formal. Apart from this usage, the talking heads on the History channel aren't especially informal, so the tone jars a little with the rest of their manner.

Regardless of how old or new it is though, I still think it's just bulls--t intended to seem more immediate and exciting.

<< I still think it's just bulls--t intended to seem more immediate and exciting.>>

Quite likely...