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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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The true sound of Australia …
Word of the week: It's that unmistakable indigenous Australian hardwood trumpet "drone pipe" classified as a brass aerophone and among its extraordinary qualities, playing helps reduce snoring and obstructive sleep apne by strengthening the muscles of the upper airways
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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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Rebecs
Word of the week: Most popular in the 13th-16th centuries, then largely replaced by the viol and violin, yet this beautiful wooden gut- and nylon-stringed instrument has a distinctive sound and still appears in some music today
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The vibraslap is a replacement for the jawbone
Word of the week: It's one of the most modern of all analogue percussion instruments, a combination of stiff wire, wooden ball and box with metal teeth, a replacement for animal bones, but where does it appear in songs?
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A typical zambomba, cuíca or friction drum
Word of the week: The evocative Spanish name for a friction drum, similar to Brazilian samba’s cuíca, it is used around the world in ceremonious or celebratory music, working as a sound box via rubbing with stick, hand or wet cloth
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Bombast, ironic and otherwise, comes in this album by The Fall
Word of the Week: It describes high-sounding, pretentious, showy language with little meaning used to impress people, and explodes enjoyably when pronounced, but how it is used in lyrics, and does it affect the natures of the song itself?
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Malignant malarkey: May and Trump
Word of the week: It means utter nonsense talk, and there’s no shortage of that – at work, home, in law, and especially in politics right now, but where does the word come from and how is it used in song lyrics?
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Scaramooche, scaramooche …
Word of the week: With an appropriately flamboyant sound and rhythm it’s a word best known for the title of Freddie Mercury’s epic Bohemian Queen song, and several major classical works, but where is it used in song lyrics?
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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?
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Sparky: ArcAttack perform with a massive Tesla coil
Word of the Week: It sizzles off the tongue, it’s the name of a great inventor, and after him, a unit of magnetic flux density, and it’s also a car, and in slang recreational drug, but where does it appear in song lyrics?
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