jolly good comma discovered
Have you ever heard a phrase your whole life and thought you knew what it meant… only to discover one day in a flash that its meaning was different that you thought? That just happened to me with the old song For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow.
But first, why was this song even in my head? Well it was like this: I was reading amendments to the U.S. constitution to see when women got the vote, and after observing that right was granted 50 years after blacks and former slaves were granted the vote… I saw the 18th amendment and got curious how long prohibition lasted. Fourteen years, it turns out. Which got me wondering about how this thing got passed, so I researched the Temperance Movement (which originally started by advocating moderation, not abstinence). And saw an old lithograph called ‘The Drunkard’s Progress’, with the phrase ‘jolly companions’ included at the apogee. 
That was enough to start the old song playing in my head. It banged around in there for a couple of days (in fact it’s still going, darn it!) and just a few minutes ago it hit me — there’s a missing comma in the phrase ‘that nobody can deny’. The actual text was probably written ‘that, nobody can deny.’ But when sung, the meter flows better without that comma.
The problem is that without the comma, the phrase ‘that nobody can deny’ can be interpreted as saying ‘nobody can deny this fellow…something’. Which is a little bit bewildering — who is trying to deny what from him — more liquor? — but who cares, it’s a fun old drinking song.
Adding the comma make the alternate and true meaning clear: ‘nobody can deny that this is indeed a jolly good fellow’. Whew. Makes me wonder how many other phrases I’ve got wrong in my head. And I’ll probably never straighten out before I die.