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As oxymorons go, it’s the operatic equivalent to Noam Chomsky’s famous syntactic puzzle “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

The lyrics, written by the still-anonymous Ghostwriter, are sophomoric, and the delivery inorganic, with paint-by-numbers metaphors and misogyny that veers away from the syntactic detail that gives both artists’ songs their uniquely incisive texture.

We talked about all sorts of things, and he loved it when I enthused about a simile or some syntactic tour de force.

And they agree that complex, conditional, coherent, syntactic, if-this-then-that language, with a plan B and a plan C, would have required a big brain.

There is a deep hunger that Sondheim satisfies, for intelligence and syntactic rigor in a form that in lesser hands comes across as pat and lazy.