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Zumbador dorado: Hispaniolan mango hummingbird of Puerto Rico
Word of the week: A wonderfully evocative noun from the Spanish for word buzz, and meaning both a South American hummingbird, a door buzzer, and symbolic of resurrection of the soul in ancient Mexican culture, while also serving as the logo for a tequila brand
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Treble clef on the nucha
Word of the week: A niche, sensual noun for a tactile area, with the related adjective nuchal, meaning related to the nape, or back or scruff of the neck. But where does it rub in music? For some light relief, here’s a variety of neck songs to send hairs standing up for different reason in this anatomical area
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Some girls’ wigs are bigger than other girls …
Word of the week: Taken from the French language, this appropriately ornate noun pertains to makers of perukes, wigs or hairpieces, a trade that has variously gone in and out of fashion over the centuries. But what about these hair pieces in song?
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Flowering Ranunculaceae
Word of the week: An adjective describing something related to or belonging to the Ranunculaceae plant family, particular those more commonly described as buttercups. But what of them in song?
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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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A md-19th century illustration of the varsovienne
Word of the week: Our latest etymological move into obscurity originates in around 1850 in Warsaw, Poland, and also known as the varsouvienne or varsoviana – a slow, graceful dance in 3/4 waltz time, which also combines elements of the mazurka and polka
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Broticolous behaviour: raccoons
Word of the week: Mice, rats, spiders, foxes to raccoons, this obscure adjective, connected to the French noun broticole, this relates to any animal and insect species with a tendency to live around and alongside humans and their dwellings perhaps as scavengers, but also showing adaptability
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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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A gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts a shadow
Word of the week: From the Ancient Greek, γνώμων (gnṓmōn)this pointed noun literally means one that knows or examines, but it is specifically the part of a sundial that casts a shadow as well as referring to other mathematical terms
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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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Homer and Bart Simpson in a regular moment of spanwhengling
Word of the week: This colourfully archaic English verb, thought to have origins in the Leeds and immediate Yorkshire area, means to shake or knock something violently
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Dance craze: depiction of the first quadrille in England at Almack’s in 1816
Word of the week: A sprightly, sociable18th- and 19th-century dance form that sprung from folk contredanses, it comprises four couples in rectangular formation and was all the range in polite society in the Victorian age in Europe and colonies, and is linked to American square dancing
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The xaque-xaque has many alternative names …
Word of the week: Sometimes also xique-xique, a wonderfully evocative, onomatopoeic term for any kind of Brazilian rattle instrument, but when used in English referring more specifically to the maracas rattle
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Kassav’ in full swing in 2009, including founder member Jacob Desvarieux, left, who died in 2021
Word of the week: In need of some virtual sunshine? Zouk is a dance music movement hailing from the French Caribbean in the early 80s, spearheaded by the pioneering band Kassav’, their zouk béton of Martinique and Guadeloupe originally featuring percussive, fast tempo with loud horn section and later synth keyboards
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A dundun set of three drums from the Playing For Change Foundation
Word of the week: These evocative, onomatopoeic variants are generic names for a family of West African talking drums, particularly in the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, Guinea, talking drums that mimic human speech, rope-tuned and cylindrical with a rawhide skin at both ends, and played with a stick
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Yatga player Altantsetseg Badgar
Word of the week: Related to the Chinese guzheng, this beautiful and delicate sounding instrument is a traditional fingernail-plucked Mongolian zither, the other hand applying pressure to strings to change the notes
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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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Three recent books that are more than relevant to the current word
Word of the week: About whom could this apply right now? It's a word for extreme, foolish pride or dangerous overconfidence, often in combination with arrogance that tends to lead to a fall, and a dangerous thing in the head of someone with power who refuses to acknowledge it.
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Autumn is a kexy time of year …
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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