It's no use, he sees her He starts to shake and cough Just like the old man in That book by Nabokov — Sting, "Don't Stand So Close to Me" (1980) The music magazine Blender recently cited Sting as the worst lyricist ever (MSNBC story here ), in part for the atrocious lyric quoted above. At the time the song first came out, much was made of Sting's ridiculous pronunciation of Vladimir Nabokov's last name, which should properly be accented on the second syllable. "That book" is obviously Nabokov's classic 1955 novel Lolita but few people have noticed another gross error in Sting's lyrics: The "old man" — the narrator of the novel who adopts the pseudonym Humbert Humbert — is hardly old! In May 1947, when Humbert Humbert first meets Dolores Haze, he is 36 or 37 and she is 12. He dies at the age of 42, and she dies at the age of 17. This is not a matter of "inside knowledge" or reading between the lines. Nabokov is extremely precise in the chronology of the novel, and only Read More...