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Single Use Song Words – Slight Reprise

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An old and well worn topic to be sure, but songs are being written all the time with previous unused words in them. I bought Richard Thompson’s new album Still yesterday and was listening to it on the walk to work this morning when my ear was caught by the following couplet (from No Peace No End):

Geneva Convention gets used as a pessary,
Olive branch is a fashion accessory

Surely ‘pessary’ has never been used in popular song before? It’s hard to think of an occasion when its use might have been necessary, but the man who once used ‘misericord’ in a song is still trawling the dictionary to widen the vocabulary of song. Any more recent entries?

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  1. A-ha, I was one of those that started such a thread a couple of years ago, under the title of ‘Words that just aren’t Rock and Roll’. Candidates included ‘parallelogram’ (Motorhead, I believe) and the double whammy in the same song of ‘wherewithal’ and ‘nonpareil’ from Clifford T Ward.

    Not such a remarkable word, but I was singing The Strawbs’ Heavy Disguise to the folk club a few weeks ago and it struck me that ‘constituent’ must be making a rare outing. Glad they didn’t try to rhyme it with anything.

  2. Nick Cave uses psychotropic and chromosome in More News From Nowhere. Chromosome might have had an outing before I suppose.

    We Call Upon The Author features myxomatoid and jejeune. I strongly suspect these are one-offs also. He certainly is a wordsmith songwriter who embraces an extensive vocabulary without shame.

    • jejeune is a marvellous word that I’d forgotten about. I shall deliberately find an occasion to use it at work tomorrow. Eg. “Im sorry Bill but your presentation is jejeune and a bit shit*”

      * I may look around for a synonym for “a bit shit”.

      • Point of information – it’s jejune, not jejeune. The etymology is from the Latin for fasting, and hence lacking in nourishment (jejunus) and not the French for young. I only know this because I remember Kingsley Amis ranting about it in the passage I have pasted below:

        Stage 1: A writes: “His arguments are unoriginal and jejune” (A knows that ‘jejune’ means ‘thin, unsatisfying’, a rare word, admittedly, but one with a nice ring to it).

        Stage 2: B notices the nice ring. He doesn’t know what the word means and, of course, wouldn’t dream of consulting a dictionary even if he possessed one. There is something vaguely French as well as nice about the ring to ‘jejune’; in fact, now he comes to think of it, it reminds him of ‘jeune’, which he knows means ‘young’. Peering at the context, he sees that ‘jejune’ could mean, if not exactly ‘young’, then something like ‘un-grown-up, immature, callow’. Hooray! – he’s always needing words for that, and here’s a new one, one of superior quality, too.

        Stage 3: B starts writing stuff like “much of the dialogue is jejune, in fact downright childish.” With the latest edition of OED giving ‘peurile’ as a sense of ‘jejune’, the story might be thought to be over, but there is one further stage.

        Stage 4: Having ‘jeune’ in their heads, people who have never seen the word in print start pronouncing ‘jejune’ not as ‘djiJOON’ but ‘zherZHERN’, in the apparent belief that French people always give a tiny stutter when they say ‘jeune’. (I have heard ‘zherZHERN’ several times in the last few years). Finally C takes the inevitable step of writing ‘jejeune’ (I have seen several examples) or even, just that much better: “Although the actual arguments are a little jéjeune, the staging of the mass scenes are {sic} impressive.” Italics in original! – which, with the newly acquired acute accent in place set the seal on the deportation of an English word into French, surely a unique event.

    • Your search – cumeweskas chickavee – did not match any documents.

      Suggestions:

      Make sure that all words are spelled correctly.
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  9. 1994ish: Danny Baker asks this same question on his breif-candle Radio 1 show. I got on with “transubstantiation” as it appears in Talking Heads’ Moon Rocks. You can probably find it elsewhere, tho. Years before, that song had also been the first time I heard the word “Yo!”, which became ubiquitous a few years later.

    While I’m here, Original Concept’s Get A Little Stupid uses the word “discombobulated”, which I’ve never heard on any other record. I’ll not go through the empty charade of posting the link, as nobody will listen to it.

  12. Brucellosis (Warren Zevon’s Play It All Night Long)
    Antediluvian (Donovan’s Atlantis)
    Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in this:

    • It would be tempting to expect that Quantum Jump would be the only ones to include Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu in a song. But of course, someone had to take it that step further.

  13. Peter Blegvad and Slapp Happy, on “Riding Tigers” from Desperate Straights, use the phrase ” we’re masticating maize,” which is not heard very often.

  14. Cumerbund (Warren Zevon – Mr Bad Example)
    Samivar (Jethro Tull – Said She Was A Dancer)

    Half Man Half Biscuit lyrics are awash with (potentially) one time use only words

    “And your unreliable Fallopian” – 1966 And All That (also featuring Lev Yashin and Ferenc Puskas)
    “Stevie nicks books about kleptomania” – Fuckin ‘Ell Its Fred Titmus
    “Milky drink and Sudafed” – Restless Legs (also references the Ogwen Lake (Llyn Ogwen))
    “vitriol, vilification, vendetta – Referees Alphabet (also mentions Yate – there is unlikely to be another song mentioning this humdrum town in the county of Avon)

  15. “Bamboozled by love.
    Oh lord, the shit done hit the fan.”

    © Frank Zappa 1984-ish

    Opening words and continuing refrain from the song “Bamboozled By Love”.

  18. Sometimes it looks like The Decemberists main goal is to be mentioned in this thread; The Infanta has phalanx, pachyderm, palanquin, I could go on.

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