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Time to weigh up this week’s word
Word of the week: In politics or business it’s always important to scrutinise the smallprint. This now antiquated, but handy and evocative word pertains to medieval market official in charge of the official weights, against which merchant weights were compared to make sure they were not cheating their customers
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Guitar crossed with cello? Arpeggione models created by luthier Philippe Berne
Word of the week: It is neither guitar nor cello, but fretted and tuned like the former, and bowed like the latter. Read on to find out more with musical examples, as well as instances where guitarists have decided to take a bow …
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Resistance and metal: the Trautonium
Word of the week: Long before Kraftwerk and other electronic music pioneers, this beautiful, eerie-sounding instrument was invented in 1929 by Friedrich Trautwein in Berlin at the Musikhochschule's music and radio lab, the Rundfunkversuchstelle
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The vibraslap is a replacement for the jawbone
Word of the week: It's one of the most modern of all analogue percussion instruments, a combination of stiff wire, wooden ball and box with metal teeth, a replacement for animal bones, but where does it appear in songs?
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Bombast, ironic and otherwise, comes in this album by The Fall
Word of the Week: It describes high-sounding, pretentious, showy language with little meaning used to impress people, and explodes enjoyably when pronounced, but how it is used in lyrics, and does it affect the natures of the song itself?
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Egrets? We have a few …
Word of the week: They are from the heron family of water-fishing birds, various in size and colour but mostly white, elegant, angular and thin, and are beautiful to watch, but how is this unusual word used in song lyrics?
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Monstrous nonsense: from the original illustration of the Jabberwock from Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass
Word of the week: It’s best known as the mythical monster in Lewis Carroll’s poem from Through The Looking Glass (1871), but the word also means nonsense or gibberish, something that continues to be very much at large
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Polar bears, and others from the bear family can sense food from as far as 20 miles
Word of the week: It refers to the system that governs our sense of smell (olfaction) and is a highly evocative word, and while there are many songs about odours, who uses it in lyrics?
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From Hawkwind’s 1977 strangely particular album …
Word of the week: It's the infinitesimally small subatomic particle which forms matter, a type of curdled cheese from soured milk, is used in computer language and in sci-fi fiction names, but where in lyrics?
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Scaramooche, scaramooche …
Word of the week: With an appropriately flamboyant sound and rhythm it’s a word best known for the title of Freddie Mercury’s epic Bohemian Queen song, and several major classical works, but where is it used in song lyrics?
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You must remember this … a kiss is just …
Word of the week: It’s an adjective with a beautiful sound. It means the characteristics of our ape cousins, but of course sharing almost all the same DNA, it also means us. But where is simian in lyrics?
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Sparky: ArcAttack perform with a massive Tesla coil
Word of the Week: It sizzles off the tongue, it’s the name of a great inventor, and after him, a unit of magnetic flux density, and it’s also a car, and in slang recreational drug, but where does it appear in song lyrics?
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