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The aspectabund performance of Gregor Fisher on the Hamlet cigar ads
Word of the week: This rare adjective describes a highly expressive face or countenance, where emotions and reactions are readily shown through the eyes or mouth
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Crapulence creeps in … but will an egg really help?
Word of the week: A term that may apply regularly during Xmas party season, from the from the Latin crapula, in turn from the Greek kraipálē meaning "drunkenness" or "headache" pertains to sickness symptoms caused by excess in eating or drinking, or general intemperance and overindulgence
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Watching one of these on the twopath? Then this word by be for you
Word of the week: A fabulous old English slang term for someone who tends to stand or sit for long periods staring at the passing of boats on canals, sometimes with a derogatory or at least ironic use for someone who is useless or lazy. But what of songs about this activity and culture?
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Bottles hanging on the wall …
Word of the week: It’s a colourful noun for an intoxicatingly visual subject, and in parallel relating to people who may be a labeorphilist or labeorphile, it refers to the enthusiasm for, and collection of beer bottle labels. But what’s the musical connection?
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Three-banded tolypeutine
Word of the week: A noun related to the term Tolypeutinae, this is a subfamily of Chlamyphoridae of the armadillo family, consisting of the giant, naked-tailed and particularly the three-banded species
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Sheep are naturally ulotrichous
Word of the week: While it’s entirely natural in animals such as sheep as well as some humans, depending on an individual’s point of view it’s either a blessing or a curse. From Greek words oûlos (crisp, curly) and -trikhos (haired), this adjective means having curly or woolly hair
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Chateau Marmont Hotel, West Hollywood, California
Word of the week: It’s something in which many of us may indulge during the thick of winter, planning for holidays via booking websites, this noun meaning the study of hotels, extending also to researching their lore and history
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Meme of the time: four lads in jeans, Birmingham 2019
Word of the week: Aside from the literal outer layer of the ray-finned slippery fish, this evocative, slightly suggestive 19th-century slang means very tight trousers, while this week’s bonus word, excruciators, points to the experience of wearing very tight shoes
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Dip yours here …
Word of the week: An evocative noun in reference to old-fashioned desk ink wells dipped into by quills or ink pens – an inkhornist is a pedant of words, while the phrase smelling of the inkhorn refers to be being excessively pedantic with language or grammar. But how does it shape up in song?
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Jenticulate with the jentacular in the morning …
Word of the week: A tasty noun and an adjective all associated with the first meal of the day - one means to take breakfast, the other, with a variant spelling, describes anything related to that meal. Both derive from the Latin noun ientaculum, meaning a breakfast taken immediately on getting up
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Titania falls under a kalopsian spell in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Drawing by Charles Buchel, 1905
Word of the week: A noun describing distorted perception, meaning the delusion of seeing things as being more beautiful than they are, or through rose-tinted glasses
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Illustration from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel by Gustave Doré
Word of the week: Huge, gigantic, enormous, voracious or insatiable, this colourful adjective derives from the character in the pioneering 16th-century French prose writer François Rabelais’s multiple volume work, Gargantua and Pantagruel
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Rucklety-tucklety cloth
Word of the week: This beautifully strange, rhythmic, rhyming, onomatopoeic English word hails from the 18th century, meaning crumpled or gathered up, often pertaining to cloth or clothing, and deriving from the word for crease – a ruckle
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William Shenstone: poet, pioneer landscape gardener and an early user of this flowery word
Word of the week: One of the longest in English, it’s the action or habit of estimating something as worthless or unimportant, but is it worth exploring this through the prism of song lyrics? Perhaps …
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That certain smile: Alan Rickman as Obadiah Slope, the calculating curate in BBC’s The Barchester Chronicies
Word of the week: It’s an adjective to describe the act of flattery, often false and deceitful, toadying, fawning and that done by a sycophant, but where does it come from and how might it show up in song?
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What old meanings are we cranking out this week?
Word of the Week: They’re going fast! This archaic adjective in use from the mid-17th to mid-19th century describes something in great demand and ready for a quick sale, from the Middle and Old English lieftell, meaning agreeable and countable
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The figure portrayed on this famous record cover could be described as a practitioner of nosism
Word of the Week: It sounds like a strange religion or nasal habit, but from Latin ‘nos’, this is the practice of using the ‘we’ pronoun when really only referring oneself in action or opinion - it’s more common in song than ‘we’ might imagine
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Adam Ant stands and delivers what could be described as a vectarious number
Word of the week: It is neither triumphant nor relating to mathematical space, but while sounding thoroughly splendid, it's an obscure 17th-century adjective meaning belonging to or associated with a wagon or carriage
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It’s all in the mind. A map of the strange theories of the bumposopher, or phrenologist
Word of the week: A delightful looking and sounding noun, and an alternative to bumpologist, this is a humorous, gently derogatory mid-19th-century word for a practitioner in the highly dubious, once-popular pseudoscience of phrenology
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XTC like to talk about the foppotee, but not always in a derogatory way
Word of the week: It’s a very rare and also pleasant sounding, poetic word that was briefly used in the 17th century, but is in fact derogatory, pertaining to simpleton. It could well describe much behaviour in modern life too. But in songs, is it always wrong to be a foppotee?
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