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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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Serial illeist Gollum from Lord of the Rings
Word of the week: A mark of self-grandeur or insecure self-consciousness? Narcissism or objectivity? An illeist is someone who talks about themselves in the third person. But how does that manifest in song?
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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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Rick Moranis is confronted by the plant, played by Levi Stubbs, in Little Shop of Horrors (1986).
Word of the week: Rare, archaic, evocative, and great to get lips and tongue around, it means to satisfy or satiate a hungry person, usually in the context of food, but of course in song lyrics that can mean a whole lot more
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Can you get a Handel on what this week’s word might be?
Word of the week: It's an obscure, archaic 19th-century word with a definition almost as strangely obvious and clear as what it describes isn't – poor, illegible handwriting, and bad spelling and grammar
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Jarvis Cocker playfully addresses the issue of the volgivagant in a classic number from 1995
Word of the week: It’s an obsolete 17th-century term pertaining to the common masses and so-called more vulgar or baser tastes within the uneducated and poor, but something that remains as relevant today in the pursuits of cultural or political popularism
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Güiro - used in more genres than you might imagine
Word of the week: Used in Latin American music, but also by artists from David Bowie to The Rolling Stones, it’s idiophone made of resonant gourd or wood, is held through holes making a rhythmic, ratchet sound by scraping a stick across specially created ridges
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