| Elvis Costello – Two Little Hitlers Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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There's some very clever wordplay that I've admired since I first heard this song! Like many female high school students in the '70s, I had to take a typing class in high school; the ideal was to learn to "touch-type," that is, to type without needing to look down at the keyboard. You can type a LOT faster by touch-typing; if you can reach 100 words per minute, you can keep up with someone speaking if they don't go too fast. The British used to use "typewriter" to mean not just the machine, but the person who operated it. On the other hand, a "soft touch" is someone that it's easy to get favors or money from. So, "she's my soft touch typewriter" can mean that whoever this verse's "she" may be, she's a soft touch (somehow I doubt that he wants to borrow money from her) and the phrase goes on to blends that expression neatly with "touch-typewriter," a very skilled typist. The kind of typist who can keep up with dictation--so, "I'm the Great Dictator" suggests, at one level, that she's his secretary, possibly one with whom he's having an affair (which wasn't difficult to persuade her to do, because she's such a soft touch.) At another level, of course, The Great Dictator plays right into the Hitler imagery, since it can also refer to the Chaplin movie satirizing Hitler and the Nazi movement. |
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