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Autumn is a kexy time of year …
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 Ariston Organette
Word of the Week: It’s a mechanical, hand-operated organ instrument first manufactured in the late 1870s playing music from perforated paper, cardboard, or metal disks on wooden rolls or “cobs” that clunkily and rather beautifully captures another era
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From The Quincunx, the 1989 novel by Charles Palliser
Word of the week: This ancient symbolic word is not really one to sing, but points down many cultural roads through history, as well as unearthing a variety of lesser known music
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Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820
Word of the week: What comes around … this week's rather shapely word circles culture in many directions – from medieval French poetry to a 17th-century musical form all the way to modern slang on sport stars to derogatory cars
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Come on feel the Illinois. The university once had its own sarrusophone section
Word of the week: A veritable behemoth of the woodwind family that stretches somewhere between bassoon and saxophone, this wonderful instrument makes a powerful sound dates back to mid-19th century France
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A Seagull S6 acoustic guitar with a beautiful burnt umber finish
Word of the week: Strong in sound and pleasing to say, this week’s word is a dark brown with a hue of yellow or red, depending on type, but does it ever show its true colours in song?
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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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Watch out for watchet - seventh from right
Word of the week: It sounds like a small timepiece or a low-key warning, but this is really word of a shade of pale blue, an angler's fly, and also a harbour town in Somerset
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The Maui Xaphoon in C
Word of the week: It's another word for bamboo saxophone, handily pocket sized, cheaper than its metal cousin being without complex valves, and closer to a clarinet, yet sounding remarkably sax-like using a similar mouthpiece and reed
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Johnson and Trump. Both deal heavily in ackamarakus, not always with success
Word of the week: It’s a rare, slang noun that could easily describe the speeches of several prominent politicians – meaningless activity just for show, deceptive nonsense and bluff. But how might it show up in song lyrics?
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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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But what happens after 22 miles?
Word of the week: Usually our entries are historical obscurities, but this verb is not yet in the formal lexicon, has only entered language via online circulation, yet has still inspired recent music and its definition harks back to great traditions
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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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Short-tailed gymnure
Word of the week: Survival concerns? Maybe be more gymnure. Small, elusive and nocturnal, it's not a rat, nor a shrew, but a furry hedgehog, a Galericinae from the Erinaceidae family, with acute senses, especially of smell, and likely resembles the earliest form of mammal
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Miso soup
Word of the week: A derivative of the French jus for juice, this rarely tasted mid-17th-century word means full of broth or soup, a deliciously evocative adjective that bubbles up a variety of associations, but does it appear in song?
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Cammelia japonica knosps, pushing out like pursed lips, are some of the first to open in the late winter period
Word of the week: Winter may still have a tight grip in the western hemisphere as spring slowly stirs, but this noun is the highly descriptive name for an unopened flower bud, and also the architectural term for bulbish knobs of a similar design
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A 3D LED music-themed lamp
Word of the week: It’s an archaic, late-Victorian word some might imagine to be associated with pugilism, but more obviously, and yet poetically means the shimmeringly fragile and hopefully beautiful art of lamp care and decoration
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Old orgiophantine work
Word of the week: It sounds like a colossal beast, and indeed much flesh is involved, except this word pertains to a person or presides over, and organises an orgy. Quite how to direct proceedings once it starts is anyone’s guess …
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Gretchen Menn, composer, solo artist, and member of the band Zepparella might well be associated with this word
Word of the week: It has been in use since the 15th century, derives from the Latin adjective pulcher, and while not exactly onomatopoeic, pertains, like the noun pulchritude, to physical beauty or ‘comeliness’.
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