Talk:Mad Dogs and Englishmen (song)

(Include lyrics?)
I want to post the lyrics but am unsure as to its copyright status — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spandox (talk • contribs) 03:11, 20 June 2007‎ Gavroche42 (talk) 12:07, 21 April 2008 (UTC) Duggy 1138 (talk) 21:52, 31 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Noel Coward died in 1973, so even in death+50 nations, this wouldn't be automatically in public domain until 2023. Since this is the entire song, and not a quote, it wouldn't fall under fair use. So it's a good bet this is a copyright violation.
 * And if it was PD the complete text belongs on wikisource not wikipedia.
 * well, it's 2023. Morenopacheco (talk) 17:41, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

(Origin?)
and me, I want to say that i have this vague recollection that the phrase 'mad dogs and englishmen go out in the noonday sun' has as its basis a line in Shakespeare, but I can't find it! perhaps someone knows... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.173.225.137 (talk) 21:08, 11 August 2007‎

--Jerzy•t 23:35, 8 October 2012 (UTC)
 * I believe the phrase has its origins with Rudyard Kipling, not Shakespeare. It has to do with British colonial India.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.81.124.52 (talk) 11:36, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes and no: Kipling, in [[Kim (novel)|Kim (novel)], may have influenced] Coward's wording, but Coward at most expressed a sentiment that predates Kipling's scraps of dialog by at least a century. (My initial research, showing how sparse library holdings of the BM are, made me mistrust Arthur's claim, but turns out [search Amazon for "Kevyn Arthur" as author to see blacklisted list of works] he had just published a relevant work widely held by academic libraries; it may even be that he uncovered a collection of original numbers of that and other Caribbean newspapers.)


 * I mis-remember it as well. But then I thought that Mandela died in prison.

Kortoso (talk) 14:58, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

more cultural references
Magnum PI episode titled mad dogs and englishmen http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0639689/ Whitis (talk) 12:53, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Meaning
It would be nice to see some explanation of what the song is about. As I understand it, the point is that in hot countries, the local custom tends to be to go inside and rest in the middle of the day when the sun is at its hottest, but that English tourists and colonizers don't do that. Why? --Abstractgrant (talk) 13:29, 18 July 2022 (UTC)


 * I don't think there's supposed to be any great mystery -- they don't come from a semi-tropical-adapted culture with an established "siesta" custom, and many of them imagined themselves to be intrepid world travellers and/or weren't really flexible enough to follow the proverb "When in Rome, do as the Romans do"... AnonMoos (talk) 14:25, 18 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Right, but this isn't explained on the page, and I think it should be. --Abstractgrant (talk) 15:06, 22 July 2022 (UTC)