ready for to fade

Humble   Sat Feb 16, 2008 2:04 pm GMT
Hello,
I know lyrics and poetry are not easy to intereprete and may have a sort of special grammar. Besides, one can’t always trust the lyrics from the Net.
I’ve got two questions about “Mr. Tambourine man”, a well-known evergreen.

I'm ready to go anywhere
I'm ready for to fade
On to my own parade
Cast your dancin' spell my way
I promise to go under it

1. ready for to fade looks ungrammatical. Could it be a mistranscript?
2. What could it mean:
I'm ready for to fade on to my own parade

The rest is clear.

Thank you.
Uriel   Sat Feb 16, 2008 8:41 pm GMT
No, it's not a typo, but it's no accident that it does look odd. "For to" is a very old-fashioned construction; modern speakers now drop the "to" and just get on with it. But you will hear it in a lot of folk-inspired music from the sixties; the Grateful Dead have it in some of their songs, so does America, and so did Bob Dylan, who (I believe) wrote "Mr. Tambourine Man".

I was flying recently and reading the seatback instrictions (yes, I was bored), and I noticed that if you translated a lot of the Spanish instructions directly into English, you would get a lot of "for to" phrases, because they still use the infinitive ("to" verbs) where English uses something else. "Para flotar" could be literally translated as "for to float" (instead of "in order to float", which textbooks often use to make it sould more sensible to English readers). However, in the English line about hanging onto your seat cushion in the event of a water landing*, they used the phrase "for flotation" -- a noun instead of a verb.


* My theory on "water landings": unless your 747 is equipped with pontoons, it really won't "land" on water. It will "hit" the water, and possibly roll around for a minute, but then there will a "water sinking" followed by a mass passenger "drowning". Unless, of course, the jet fuel leaks out in a big hydrocarbon slick and catches on fire, in which case you will see a mass passenger "charring". My seat cushion said nothing about batting out flames or sharks, either.
Uriel   Sun Feb 17, 2008 2:23 am GMT
Oops, sorry, I meant that we now drop the "for", not the "to". We would say "ready to fade".
Humble   Sun Feb 17, 2008 8:06 am GMT
Thank you, Uriel.
What remains obscure, though, is #2, some kind of metaphor I don't get.
By the way, while reading a book by R.Pilcher not long ago I was puzzled by the seemingly superfluous "for" in this sentence:
<The village shop, this morning, was busy, and she had to wait for a little to be served. >
The same old-fashioned usage? Or the same preposition as in "wait for six hours" ?