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. Whether that be the better known imperial measurements, or lesser known ones such as a grain (64.79891 mg, 1⁄7000 of a pound), dramor drachm (27.34375 gram (sixteenth of an ounce ), nail (1⁄16 cwt = 7 lb), clove (7 lb for wool or 8 lb for cheese), or tod (2 stones), or indeed the troy and tower, former subdivisions used for coins and precious metals, it is easy to imagine how these measurements could be corrupted without an official version.
From the Latin zygostates, from Greek zugostatēs, the word ceased usage in the the 17th century, and it’s nigh impossible to find any examples in song, but the root, zygo, relating to joining or pairing, has examples in lyrics in the form of zygote, meaning the fertilised ovum or cell formed from the union of two different haploid gametes. So that’s a differing measuring of parts, and relating this lost word into a musical context, here are some lyrical uses of zygote, or zygotic to pair up with the older meaning.
Of course in band name, there’s always the 90s Welsh psychedelic band Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, fronted by Euros Childs:
Yet in lyrics, where better to look than in the opus of those other quirky eccentrics They Might Be Giants, who employ the word zygote also in its biological context in this formative 1996 song?
When I was only a zygote
I still remember the time
When there was nothing to know or to think about
Except the sound of my mind
And the sound from outside
Or indeed that pioneer of articulate hip hop, MF Doom from Gazillion Ear (2009):
In any event it's fake like wrestling Get em like Jake The Snake on mescalines Ahem, elixir for the dry throat Tried to hit the high note, Villain since a itsy bitsy zygote
So then any more zygo-formed words come to mind in lyrics, whether related to fertilised ova or weights and measures? Feel free to share any examples in songs, instrumentals, on albums, film, art or other contexts in comments below.
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