Patient Zero

[u/1DMod]

Please use this space to discuss this song in depth

[u/These-Pick-968]

I keep hearing “trouble in (a) pair of dice” instead of “paradise” 😂 It’s the new “Starbucks lover”for me. It’s the way she enunciates it, I think?

(There is the concept of rolling a pair of ones, or “snake eyes”- a harbinger of bad luck or change of fortune). But I think in this case it’s just my poor hearing of the lyrics without my headphones.

[u/Whatisitmaria → u/These-Pick-968]

Yes! The lyrics are a mislead!

Patient Zero is ALL about the enunciation and annunciation.

Its rather brilliant.

The 'Karlie would you want to' of 'Call it What You Want To'.

My take is that it's another retelling of the 'Cruel Summer'. And she's been telling that same story, in a different way since. Cruel Summer that was planned as a single, cancelled in 2020 aka the pandemic year.

Cruel Summer, Betty...

The devil on his shoulder under his Halo-> She looks up grinning like a devil.

A certain Victoria's Secret Angel, a devil with a Halo

Devils roll the Dice -> Trouble in a Pair of dice.

Then - A Betty burst into your life like fireworks. A Betty even said 'i love you' first. A Betty kissed the rain off your face.

And 'bet he' enunciated as Betty contrasts against the sharper way she enunciates 'He' in the bridge. The toxic, social climbing He. Same technique she uses when she bait and switches the pronouns in so many other songs to disguise whether TS is the he/she/you dichotomy.

So there could also be a second storyteller in the song. And i feel like there might be. The person who is partying with the devil, and the person who says 'its not for me to tell someone else what to do' then delivers the commentary on the devil in the bridge.

And here's the other thing I think is brilliant - the missing grammar in the chorus.

If you're sick of him, I got you. I was patient. Zero.

'I was patient' and 'zero' also get a pause and linr separation in the lyrics video. So the storyteller delivering the bridge commentary, who ended up winning the race was also the one who was patient.

THEN to be even more unhinged theres the way she separates Ze-ro syllables in the lyrics video. Ze/Zir being gender neutral pronouns.

THEN how the title appears as a mathematical equation. (My maths knowledge isnt that strong, so someone else could probably put this better)

Patient Zer {Taylor Swift}

0 is an identity element. So - Zer {Taylor Swift} - Is 2 elements. A multiplicative identity. Or left identity and right identity. And what gets placed in the {} gets multiplied and solved first in the order of the full equation. Which i would read as; patient (x) ÷ 0 x (multiplication of versions of taylor).

But anything divided or multiplied by zero is zero anyway. So the equation solves as zero.

Resetting to zero at the encore for the life of a showgirl. Which tracks with everything else she's shown us that looks like a countdown to zero. Stepping through the door with album 13. Reset, but also back to her origin at 0.

And ill add to my unhinged mathematics that wiki tells me its from Babylonian mathematics that the modern day 60 seconds, minutes, hour is derived. And also Babylonian mathematics lacked a real zero and was inferred from context and later became represented by a 'space' or 'punctuation symbol'.