Welcome back* to Imprecise Song Lyrics Club.
This evening our featured lyricist is Mr Paul Weller, one-time tunesmith with popular beat combo the Jams. In his song “Porcelain gods”, Mr Weller writes:
Too much will kill you,
Too little ain’t enough
On first reading both propositions advanced here seem intuitively valid, but – I put it to you – are they? Certainly, too much over-proof rum or carbon monoxide or acceleration into a bend will tend to kill you, but does this proposition hold more generally? I think not. In some cases, too much will simply result in a stomach ache or an overdraft, or in the decision to call a taxi when you had intended to walk.
No, Mr Weller: too much will not necessarily kill you. For greater precision, the lines in question should have been drafted as follows:
Too much is excessive,
Too little ain’t enough
Very little there with which anyone could argue, I think you’ll find.
*To anyone for whom this comes as the second or subsequent post with this theme, perhaps because they are reading it in a period in the future relative to the time of writing.
Workers’ Playtime 
2 Comments
Then again, Mr. Weller has always had a tendency to exaggerate. He also wrote, for instance, “In the city / there are a thousand things I want to say to you,” but it would have probably been more precise to say, “In the city / there are quite a few things I want to say to you.” I mean, who has a thousand things to say to anyone, whether in the city or in a more rural location?
I remember, when I was youbng me and a friend decided that Brian May’s song “too much love will kill you” should have “love” deleted and changed to “Barium Chloride” – which is true, too much barium chloride will kill you.