Your Custom Text Here
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
Read more
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 …
Read more
Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer
Word of the week: Also known as the banjulele, this resonant cross between the banjo and ukelele was first build in 1917 and became especially popular in the 1920s and 30s
Read more
What’s not to love? Aardvarks
Word of the week: It’s that appealing, nocturnal, burrowing African mammal with a long snout that lives on ants and termites, but is also slang in parts of the US for an mistake-prone person and even an uncircumcised penis
Read more
An ichthyosaur could be a long as 15 metres. Surely that’s worth a song or two?
Word of the week: After last week’s fictional Jabberwocky, a real-life deep-sea dinosaur, a fish-reptile with an extraordinary evolutionary history on land and sea, famous in fossils, but where can we dive to find it in song lyrics?
Read more
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?
Read more
A famous whippet frisbee-catching champion?
Word of the Week: It’s a slim, fast dog, the name of a car, a ship, a tank and a light aircraft, and also slang for recreational use of nitrous oxide from small metal containers, but where does it appear in song?
Read more