You, Too, Can Have a Viral Tweet Like Mine: Demystifying Poetic Meter

Here are some things that happen when you go viral on Twitter for pointing out that the first two lines of Stephen Sondheim’s “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” can be sung to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”:

Your notifications will blow up with hyperbolic expressions of anguish and hostility, Twitter’s preferred mode of praise. (“I hate this.” “This hurts me.” “This can’t be legal.” “Quick question, how dare you?” “A curse upon you.” “The mindfuck of this has given me a deeper appreciation for characters in Lovecraftian horror. It … should not be.”) The Classic FM website will run a story on you headlined “Someone is setting Sweeney Todd lyrics to the tune of ‘Hallelujah’ and it’s honestly fantastic,” misidentifying you as “a young writer from Connecticut, US.” Your mother will kvell over her viral daughter on Facebook and in a mass email to all her friends. You will wonder why this is all happening around this tweet, which is decidedly B material, while your A material languishes in obscurity.

Above all, though, you will be confronted by men who insist on being confidently, floridly wrong at you. I’m given to understand that this is common on Twitter in general, but up till this point, my anonymity and gender ambiguity had spared me. Once I went viral, though, the men-who-were-wrong came out in full force. One guy