Few remember an old Herman’s Hermits song called “No Milk Today,” but indulge me. Toward the end of this 1966 tune, which is basically about a milkman feeling shattered because a woman he had an affair with has given him the brushoff, a chorus lyric goes as follows: “No milk today, my love has gone away / the bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the dawn.”
All my life I’ve been hearing that last stanza as “the bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the gore.”
All along I’ve been presuming that the lyricist (Graham Gouldman) was using “gore” to describe the aftermath of a love affair in the same vein of Bernie Taupin writing “love lies bleeding in my hands.”
On top of which “gore” is a much better rhyme with “forlorn” than “dawn” is.
