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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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Loweswater in the Cumbrian Lake District
Word of the week: A poetic word taken from the Latin lacus and French or Italan lacustre, this shimmering liquid of an adjective means relating to, formed in, living in, or growing in lakes, lake-like or positioned by a lake
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A noddypoll may be a fool, but can a fool be wise?
Word of the week: This week’s whimsy dates back to as early as 1529 in the the writing of Tudor poet John Skelton, with one of several words for number of similar words for fools or simpletons, pertaining to those who might unthinkingly nod their head to anything
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Quaquaversal firework
Word of the week: An adjective with origins in the late 17th century meaning pointing or heading off in all directions – particularly as in the point of a compass, sometimes pertaining to geographical structure, or such as with an exploding firework
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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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Chews … Wrigley’s - poster campaign around 1929-1936
Word of the week: A tasteful word in a sense – but not, unfortunately, referring to any form of gentle, dental, melodic xylophone-style playing, but simply an 18th-century dialect word for chewing or mastication
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Umbriphilous bluebells …
Word of the week: An adjective describing that which loves the shade, whether person, plant or otherwise, from the Latin, umbra, for shade and related to other derivatives, such as umbraphile, one who loves eclipses
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Vorlus-snorlus numbers
Word of the week: A strangely poetic, archaic Gloucestershire term meaning haphazard, pertaining to a a person who acts at random, possibly a corruption of the Latin term nolens volens, meaning neither willing nor unwilling, related to the word willy-nilly
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Alan Rickman as whe wheedling, warzling Obadiah Slope in a BBC TV production of The Barchester Chronicles
Word of the week: An evocative Old English-origin dialect word for sycophantic flattery, pertaining to sly persuasion for favours, it derives from two old English words – wær meaning cautious, and sealm meaning speech
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Pages 150-151 of Robert Recorde’s 1557 work The Whetstone of Witte describes the cubic term of zenzizenzizenzic
Word of the week: We return to the alphabet’s end with a word that’s as wonderfully weird, yet buzzily beautifully in sound as it is obscure and obsolete – an antiquated mathematical term meaning the eighth power of a number x, where x is multiplied by itself 8 times
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Meadowlark at first light
Word of the week: An evocative, poetic French word adopted into English language in the 17th century meaning a song or poem set, or performed, at dawn or evoking daybreak, most often about lovers separating – and the flipside of a serenade
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Romanian nai virtuoso Gheorghe Zamfir
Word of the week: This Romanian 17th-century panpipe is a mainstay of traditional folk and classical music, wide in range and resonant, it is made up of at least 20 pipes made of bamboo or reed in the diatonic scale of C or G, and emits a clean, distinctive sound
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A standard cümbüş is unfretted, but other versions include frets
Word of the week: A 20th-century hybrid of oud and banjo, this Turkish instrument, meaning fun or revelry, has a wooden bowl for resonance, giving it rounder, less tinny sound, comes in fretless and fretted forms, and was created by Zeynel Abidin Cümbüş, who unusually renamed himself after his instrument
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Harald Bode with his pioneering melochord in 1947
Word of the week: A postwar milestone and highly influential in electronic instrument evolution, the melochord is a monophonic keyboard created by German pioneer Harald Bode (1909–1987) in 1947 and based on vacuum tube technology
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The Suzuki Omnichord
Word of the week: Out latest instrument in the series is was first released in 1981 by Suzuki, including a touch plate called SonicStrings, preset rhythms, auto-bass line function, and sets of single buttons for playing major, minor, and 7th chords in different keys
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Vintage damascene violin with interwoven silver and gold
Word of the Week: Craft, art, flower, a city and people, it’s a word used in different parts of speech, meanings and associations, it has a certain musical beauty to its sound but is surprisingly rare in song lyrics
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One of many visual impressions of the great early Renaissance satirist François Rabelais
Word of the Week: It’s a bewildering world, and this wonderful sounding evocative verb, attributed originally to translated François Rabelais from 1469, indeed means to confuse, and its four syllables trundle musically with a form of crash-bang rhythm
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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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