This song is about the 19th-Century British classicist and translator Benjamin Jowett, but mainly in the way in which spanish moss is about a branch.

Jowett’s students, allegedly, wrote a verse about him, which is useful for pronouncing his last name:

My name is Benjamin Jowett
And if it is knowledge I know it.
I teach at Balliol College,
And what I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

I’ve taken this and run with it, to see where it would go — without, I’m afraid, much regard for the old guy’s legacy. I hope he doesn’t mind.

My song includes a few true things about Jowett — he had a thing for Florence Nightingale; he was considered heretical as Anglican clergymen go. But the better part is bunkum, or the gratuitous projection of the author’s personal ennui onto the defenseless corpse of an Oxford Don. If you are doing a report on Benjamin Jowett for school, move along.

But the pronunciation of Benjamin Jowett’s last name — it must be admitted and certainly stands to reason and ought not to be the subject of rational doubt — is one of the things that a person might know. And now you know it. So there.