# Docked away



## JungKim

This song "Heathens" has these lyrics:


> Welcome to the room of people
> Who have rooms of people that they loved one day
> Docked away



What does 'Docked away' here mean?


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## GreenWhiteBlue

It seems to mean "stored", but that's just a guess.  Note that modern song lyrics are often written in non-standard English, are frequently unintelligible, and in some cases mean nothing at all.


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## Myridon

I'm pretty sure I hear "stacked away" or "stocked away" which are more clearly "stored."


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## JungKim

Myridon said:


> I'm pretty sure I hear "stacked away" or "stocked away" which are more clearly "stored."


I doubt that. The /s/ sound you heard may very well be that of an instrument or some digital machine. The same /s/ sound can be heard throughout the song. So it's 'Docked away'.


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## solasola

I just wonder: could it mean being put on the witness/accused stand?


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## Glenfarclas

solasola said:


> I just wonder: could it mean being put on the witness/accused stand?



Americans don't use "dock" in that sense at all.


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## ManOfWords

Any british person here who might know it? I am also interested in knowing it ^^


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## ManOfWords

It's american usage???


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## Laya_Mame

Could it be "locked away"?


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## kngram

Docked away is a word combination from NASA's terminology concerning spacecraft. 'To dock' means 'to join together in space' in the context. 'To dock away' means 'to dock somewhere far away'.


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## ManOfWords




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## sdgraham

kngram said:


> 'To dock away' means 'to dock somewhere far away'.



Can you cite a reference to this?
Thanks.


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## kngram

sdgraham said:


> Can you cite a reference to this?
> Thanks.





sdgraham said:


> Can you cite a reference to this?
> Thanks.


By all means! 
The band Twenty one pilots wrote the song about their fans. This imagery describes their fans as a constellation of joined spacecraft somewhere in space. The NASA terminology has its origins in the terminology of sea shipping. There is well known a word combination ”the ship docked away from town” in such terminology. The whole context of the lyrics presupposes that ”the spacecraft docked somewhere far away”.


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## kngram

ManOfWords said:


>


Thanks )))


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## sdgraham

The ship docked away from town is not the same as "docked away" that is not followed by more information.
Consider, for example., "shoot."
"Shoot away" means "go ahead and shoot."
"Shoot away from the house" means to direct one's shooting in an opposite direction.
I suggest reviewing:
hack away at
Pile away


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## kngram

It seems  that the informal phraseological verbs you suggested cannot have anything to do with the poetry in question. The syntax of the text informs that "the room of people docked away". The verb "dock" is intransitive here. The phrasal verb 'dock away' does not exist. So, 'away' here is an adverb in the sentence. We may list all possible meanings of this adverb, which can be combined in meaning with the intransitive verb 'dock' : - stays some distance from a place or person; - into or in a safe or enclosed place. Being in space contradicts the concept of being in enclosed place. It only remains 'being in some distance from a place or person.'' Space ships docking suggests that they are 'somewhere far away' even in the orbit of the Earth. What then we must speak about outer space in general?


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## Andygc

There's nothing suggesting constellations of spacecraft in the lyrics. To quote Amanda Valentine (see the link in the OP) 





> _We were trying to give a very subtle nod to Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison performance._


That fits with such lyrics as





> You're loving on the psychopath sitting next to you
> You're loving on the murderer sitting next to you


But trying to analyse lyrics can be a fruitless activity.


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## sdgraham

Andygc said:


> There's nothing suggesting constellations of spacecraft in the lyrics. To quote Amanda Valentine (see the link in the OP) That fits with such lyrics asBut trying to analyse lyrics can be a fruitless activity.


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## kngram

As far as I can see we read only the first paragraph of the verse. Dear friends, you jumped more deeper in the text. There is a large amount of literature on the lyrics in question. So, analyzing lyrics is not so futile as it can seem.


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## ManOfWords

It's getting interesting!!!!


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## owlman5

kngram said:


> As far as I can see we read only the first paragraph of the verse. Dear friends, you jumped more deeper in the text. There is a large amount of literature on the lyrics in question. So, analyzing lyrics is not so futile as it can seem.


It often _is_ a futile effort to try to pin some universally accepted meaning on the words and phrases that are used in popular songs, kngram.  Because lyrics don't have to conform to any standards of comprehensibility, songwriters are free to use words and phrases that don't have any particular meaning to anyone other than themselves.


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## kngram

ManOfWords said:


> It's getting interesting!!!!


)


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## kngram

owlman5 said:


> It often _is_ a futile effort to try to pin some universally accepted meaning on the words and phrases that are used in popular songs, kngram.  Because lyrics don't have to conform to any standards of comprehensibility, songwriters are free to use words and phrases that don't have any particular meaning to anyone other than themselves.


In the theory of literature there are two areas of scientific research in poetry: poetics and hermeneutics. If we start discussing them here, dear owlman5,  wordreference will become a literary miscellany on the Internet.


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## owlman5

kngram said:


> In the theory of literature there are two areas of scientific research in poetry: poetics and hermeneutics. If we start discussing them here, dear owlman5,  wordreference will become a literary miscellany on the Internet.


That was my attempt to express support for an earlier remark that Andygc made in regard to the general practice of analyzing lyrics that don't have any specific meaning.  It was not my attempt to invite a discussion of anything, kngram.  Arguably, JungKim's thread began to become a literary miscellany shortly after Glenfarclas responded to a question in post #6.


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## kngram

owlman5 said:


> That was my attempt to express support for an earlier remark that Andygc made in regard to the general practice of analyzing lyrics that don't have any specific meaning.  It was not my attempt to invite a discussion of anything, kngram.  Arguably, JungKim's thread began to become a literary miscellany shortly after Glenfarclas responded to a question in post #6.


))) Thank you


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## JungKim

kngram said:


> The band Twenty one pilots wrote the song about their fans.


Correct.



kngram said:


> This imagery describes their fans as a constellation of joined spacecraft somewhere in space. The NASA terminology has its origins in the terminology of sea shipping.


That only the songwriter himself can confirm.



kngram said:


> There is well known a word combination ”the ship docked away from town” in such terminology. The whole context of the lyrics presupposes that ”the spacecraft docked somewhere far away”.





kngram said:


> The syntax of the text informs that "the room of people docked away". The verb "dock" is intransitive here.


Regarding the syntax, what makes you think that 'dock' is used as an intransitive verb?

I think the lyrics mean that the people in the room (mentioned in the first line) have their own rooms (of people that they loved one day) docked away. So, it's their own rooms (of people that they loved one day) that were docked away.

True, it may not be idiomatic to treat 'rooms' just like 'ships' (or even 'space ships' as you suggest) to justify the use of the verb 'dock', but it seems to me that the verb 'dock' is used as a transitive verb.


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## kngram

JungKim said:


> That only the songwriter himself can confirm.


They have confirmed it. Please, look at the video for the hit song. The authors made a hint at it in the first frames of the video.


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## kngram

JungKim said:


> Regarding the syntax, what makes you think that 'dock' is used as an intransitive verb?


In the lyrics, the verb 'dock' is used as intransitive because there are no objects,  no constructions with passive 'to be.' The same conclusion can be confirmed by enumerating all possible uses of the verb 'dock' with the necessary complements in each case. Also, the sentence 'Welcome to the room of people Docked away'  looks like 'Welcome to the room of people That docked away' along the lines of syntax.
Both verbs 'dock' and 'love' are used for the same time frame, that is, events occur as if they happened simultaneously in the past. It is a usual mode enough for characterizing the importance of the events for the authors, even in the present.


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## Andygc

If you treat this as normal English, you have "Welcome to the room of people who have rooms of people that they loved one day docked away". Simplified a little that becomes "Welcome to the room of people who have rooms of people they docked away". "Docked" is a past participle used transitively. It is perfectly reasonable and normal to use "dock" transitively "The captain docked the ferry in Hull". The WordReference dictionary provides several other examples.


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## JungKim

kngram said:


> They have confirmed it. Please, look at the video for the hit song. The authors made a hint at it in the first frames of the video.


I've seen the music video. I don't know where in the first frames they hint that their fans are "a constellation of joined spacecraft somewhere in space." There's no picture of space or of spacecraft in the video.



Andygc said:


> If you treat this as normal English, you have "Welcome to the room of people who have rooms of people that they loved one day docked away". Simplified a little that becomes "Welcome to the room of people who have rooms of people they docked away". "Docked" is a past participle used transitively. It is perfectly reasonable and normal to use "dock" transitively "The captain docked the ferry in Hull". The WordReference dictionary provides several other examples.


I was writing basically the same response, but yours came up. Thanks.


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## kngram

JungKim said:


> I think the lyrics mean that the people in the room (mentioned in the first line) have their own rooms (of people that they loved one day) docked away. So, it's their own rooms (of people that they loved one day) that were docked away.


'The room of people' means 'the space with people" as the most generic meaning  for this combination of words.


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## Andygc

kngram said:


> 'The room of people' means 'the space with people" as the most frequent meaning for this combination of words.


 in what language? In English it means the room containing people.


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## kngram

Dear Andygc, 'space' is the most generic meaning of the noun 'room'. You have indicated one of its specific meanings.


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## Andygc

Your claim that "The room of people" has the most frequent meaning "The space with people" is, quite simply, nonsense. I think you would have great difficulty finding the phrase being used that way by English speakers.

Your edit, changing "frequent" to "generic", makes no difference to the actual meaning of that group of words.


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## kngram

Editing was the result of my previous mistake, which you had noticed. Poetic perception is somewhat different from the perception of prose generally.

[Topic drift removed.  DonnyB - moderator]


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## ManOfWords

Guess we all need some room to think it all over ...


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## kngram

They have already docked. ) That is why, in narrow sense, the room is for docking.


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## Semnodime

JungKim said:


> This song "Heathens" has these lyrics:
> What does 'Docked away' here mean?


I guess you took the lyrics from metro lyrics or some other source that's been copypasting them from there.
AFAIK, there is no genuine lyrics available (for close to any song, sadly, but it's _art _anyway. we have to _interpret_)
*I hear "darked away"* which is plausible to me because *it carries the same meaning as "locked away into a dark room"* wich applies to a prison, as well as to any dark spot in your heart, when you have to let something fade or actively block out of your mind.


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## ManOfWords

Semnodime said:


> I guess you took the lyrics from metro lyrics or some other source that's been copypasting them from there.
> AFAIK, there is no genuine lyrics available (for close to any song, sadly, but it's _art _anyway. we have to _interpret_)
> *I hear "darked away"* which is plausible to me because *it carries the same meaning as "locked away into a dark room"* wich applies to a prison, as well as to any dark spot in your heart, when you have to let something fade or actively block out of your mind.


 I hear it now too ...


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## kngram

It might have seemed to be so but there is no such sense of the word 'dark' at all. There is only one rare similar meaning that the word 'dark' has actually in literature and in practice. This is 'to grow dark'. Also, the whole sense of the poetic paragraph seems to be ruined totally, if we stuck to your theory.
Please, compare:
Welcome to the room of people
Who have rooms of people that they loved one day
Darked away
(it has grown dark at some distance from a paricular place. Where the impersonal 'it-construction' implied usually means weather conditions or some surroundings closely around somebody. Meaning of such phrases is exclusivily intransitive usually). It's hard to understand what has 'grown dark' in the lyrics.
It seems this concept is from the Russian site www. russia-video-news. ru that has been blocked because of some technical issues on many web-browsers. That is why I have no possibility to comment on the original concept in detail.


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## Cagey

Genius.com has this version of the song, with 'stocked', not '<docked>.'
(Myridon has already suggested this above.)

Welcome to the room of people​Who have rooms of people that they loved one day​Stocked away​Source: twenty one pilots – Heathens​
That is,  they have rooms of people they once loved stored somewhere for future use.
​I suspect this version is correct because:
(1) it is idiomatic and makes more sense.​(2) Genius.com is a relatively reliable source of lyrics.​​People familiar with lyrics contribute to Genius.com and correct errors.  Many people have commented on this song. Someone would have commented if the lyrics were incorrect or disputed.

< Edited to correct typo. >


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## kngram

Thanks for your opinion. I can't comment on such new concept at once. I told about the usage of the word 'dark' as a verb.


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## kngram

Sorry, Cagey. I can't agree with the lyrics how it has been presented on Genius. com. It seems to be a slight typo. The reason is that the participle 'stocked' implies only inanimate objects to collect. If we presuppose that the object of the participle is 'room' or 'rooms' then it could has been so. There is only a little objection, such reading of the text is rare in comparison to the text's presentations having the phrase 'docked away', which are numerous on the Web. Fashionable modern classics were always disputable. Just saying.


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## Andygc

kngram said:


> The reason is that the participle 'stocked' implies only inanimate objects to collect


No, it does not. That usage seems perfectly reasonable to me.


Cagey said:


> I suspect this version is correct because:
> (1) it is idiomatic and makes more sense.


Agreed. Even though Cagey and I speak different versions of English, this is idiomatic both sides of the Atlantic.

It is not possible to draw any conclusion from the number of websites that have "docked". The internet is rife with plagiarised website content.


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## JungKim

Cagey said:


> Genius.com has this version of the song, with 'stocked', not '<docked>.'
> (Myridon has already suggested this above.)
> 
> Welcome to the room of people​Who have rooms of people that they loved one day​Stocked away​Source: twenty one pilots – Heathens​
> That is,  they have rooms of people they once loved stored somewhere for future use.
> ​I suspect this version is correct because:
> (1) it is idiomatic and makes more sense.​(2) Genius.com is a relatively reliable source of lyrics.​​People familiar with lyrics contribute to Genius.com and correct errors.  Many people have commented on this song. Someone would have commented if the lyrics were incorrect or disputed.
> 
> < Edited to correct typo. >



If you click on "Stocked away" in the lyrics there, three lines are highlighted and you get the annotation for the highlighted lines, the first paragraph of which says:


> Similar to the later lyric about not knowing murderers and psychopaths next to you, Tyler says that even if we can hide our mental issues and “dock them away,” our minds are still dangerous.



From the quotes, the writer of this annotation clearly knows that the phrase is not idiomatic.
So I guess that if anything is a typo, it's the 'Stocked away'.


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## kngram

Good poetry, and the stunning popularity that Twenty One Pilots enjoys, a sure sign of good poetry, is always accurate in describing the circumstances and feelings of the poet. It seems to me that everything is simple. The group describes in the second paragraph how they are perceived by a large audience when their fans' faces are lit by concert lights or when they light lighters in unanimous support for the artists. From the stage, it really looks like a starry sky, which is above us when the stars are in the sky at night.


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## Andygc

No, Jung Kim. The annotation was not written by Tyler, so you cannot assume that this is anything more than quoting the song, and possibly quoting it inaccurately. Whoever wrote the annotation makes no comment on whether or not "docked" is idiomatic. 





> Similar to the later lyric about not knowing murderers and psychopaths next to you, Tyler says that even if we can hide our mental issues and “dock them away,” our minds are still dangerous, if only to us.


That was written 3 years ago and has not been edited since. I cannot see when the lyrics text was last amended.

However, the question was answered in post 2


GreenWhiteBlue said:


> It seems to mean "stored",


Whether it is _stocked_ or _docked_ really doesn't matter.


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## kngram

Poets aren't obliged to explain their poems. Though, every prominent text is explained in detail by literature critics in any English language culture, even in the pop music domain. Although, the debate and discussion on the issue never really end.


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## JungKim

Andygc said:


> No, Jung Kim. The annotation was not written by Tyler, so you cannot assume that this is anything more than quoting the song, and possibly quoting it inaccurately. Whoever wrote the annotation makes no comment on whether or not "docked" is idiomatic.


You're right. It was not written by Tyler but by seven contributors, and if you click on "7 contributors" and then "view all edits", you can see seven edits over time, mostly about 3 years ago, when the song hit the market. Now, the "dock them away" (including the double quotes) portion was stated from the first edit through the seventh. So I guess all seven contributors agreed on the phrase. It's highly unlikely that the first contributor used the double quotes for the phrase without any particular reason and then the next six contributors simply overlooked the phrase even with the conspicuous double quotes.

I think that the contributors knew that "docked away" was not idiomatic, because they specifically put the double quotes around the phrase _dock them away_. Of course, there can be different reasons for using double quotes, but since the actual wording of the lyrics is _docked away_, not _dock them away_, it's most likely that they put the double quotes to indicate that there's something special about this particular phrase, and that special something, I think, arises out of the fact that the phrase is not idiomatic but poetic.


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## Andygc

JungKim said:


> if you click on "7 contributors" and then "view all edits", you can see seven edits over time,


Yes, I know. How do you think I knew it was written 3 years ago?  I've seen a video with the song and I agree that it does sound more like "docked" than "stocked", but I can't be sure. Quite frankly, I don't think it matters in the slightest whether the word is "docked" or "stocked". You asked


JungKim said:


> What does 'Docked away' here mean?


I've no doubt that it means "stored" or "put away". It also doesn't matter much that "docked" is not usually used to mean "stored"; I'd describe its use as figurative rather than poetic.

Earlier in the thread I commented on the futility of debating the meaning of lyrics. There is a very well-known song, _Peggy Gordon_. There's no debate about whether or not it's _Peggy_, but I have seen a near endless and inconclusive online debate about whether it is an Irish or Scottish song, based on people's opinions on whether or not _Peggy _is more common a name in Scotland or Ireland. The song was actually collected in Nova Scotia (Canada) in the 1950s and was derived from a New York vaudeville song dating from 1884, _Sweet Maggie Gordon_ (_Peggy _and _Maggie _are both short forms of _Margaret_). Here we have a song, _Heathens_, that is accompanied by a video set in a prison with no sign of a star in the sky, but because at one point in the song the singer (probably) sang _docked_, we have castles in the air being built about constellations in space.

I always regard debates about lyrics as being about as reliable as that debate about Peggy Gordon.


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## kngram

) Sorry, they didn't tell about castles in the sky. They tell about difference between heathens that means 'unbelievers' and how a society, consisting usually of imperfect humans, can formulate and ask for high truths. So, it seems they are OK with their poetry.


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## Andygc

"Castles in the air" are complicated structures that don't exist.


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## kngram

In the air or 'in Spain' means having a visionary or unattainable scheme, what good pop-music poetry is not actually. Please, consult your possible acquainteces about the question in a local HMRC office.


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