Duco01 mentions that the Dan use the word “bodacious” in the lyrics of “Gaucho”,
Which set me on the thought of single use words in songs.
R Thompson used the word illustrious in the song Albion Sunrise.
Ry Cooder used copastatic in John Lee Hooker for President
A personal favourite is caterempously in Big Muff by J Martyn though I am somewhat doubtful about its veracity.
Are there other single use words or have these been used in other songs?
Singular use in a song
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fat finger blues
Copastatic; not mcopastatic though extra points if you can find a mcopastatic in the Highlands.
I think you’ll find it’s “copacetic”. I have heard it pronounced with short and long e.
That’s what I thought it was, however the last word is definitely copastatic to rhyme with democratic.
Oh. As you were.
The song, Foreign Affair by Tom Waits, contains (not only, obvs) the following words:
subsequently, transient, perspective, itinerary, fathomed, vagabonds, knowed, relentless, quest, apprehending, contradiction, conjunction, furthermore, characteristically, evoke, juxtaposed, parlayed
Tom also employed “copacetic” in ‘I Can’t Wait To Get Off Work’:
“Oh your loving is a rare and a copacetic gift…”
someone else got to ‘juxtaposed’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmCZ4f8NhOk
Two single users (surely) from Richard Thompson – Miserichord (Outside of the Inside) and Pessary (No Peace No End).
And Motörhead by Motörhead has ‘parallelogram’.
I like Nick Cave’s use of prolix in We Call Upon The Author from Dig Lazarus Dig.
And the rest: jejeune, myxomatoid, spraddle, guruing
Captain Beefheart has an entire dictionary of single-use words, but “bulbous” is a good place to start.
Didn’t Van use that on Veedon Fleece?
ISWYDT
Was he referring to a larger than average gob-iron?
Elephant Talk by King Crimson seems to be a collection of words about speaking that Adrian Belew either likes or dislikes. He barely gets past words beginning with D, but he comes out with some pretty good ones.
Ballyhoo, Bicker, Balderdash, Brouhaha, Chitchat, Defamation, Dissension, Duologue, Diatribe.
Skip to 2m24s if you don’t want to see Trey Gunn and Tony Levin’s intro duet on Warr touch guitar and Chapman Stick respectively.
Let alone ‘neurosurgeon’, yea verily ‘schizoid’.
The Mothers of Invention use “discorporate” and helpfully give the definition.
Brucelosis (a kind of disease affecting cattle) Warren Zevon’s Play It All Night Long
Serriculture (silk worm farming) The Human League’s Being Boiled
Awopbapaloombamawopbamboom (Little Richard Tutti Fruiti\
‘scuse spelllings
Parthenogenesis – Nemesis by Shriekback
As I’ve said many times, the answer is Sparks. How many songs have the word hippopotamous in them?………. and he are some more..
Unilaterally, parenthetical, hindrance, butler, glutton, stampeding, lawnmower, existential, hospitality, descendants.
However lawnmower occurs in I Know What I Like (in Your Wardrobe) Genesis.
Does wardrobe occur in any other song (apart from a DFS advert possibly)?
“The wardrobe towers like a beast of prey” in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle by The Smiths
Well, there’s this one:
They also used” Holimakittiloukachichichi” in a song for our times but I think they made it up.
Not to mention mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey.
Hiphopopotamus?
Some time ago, I did a ‘Words that are not Rock’n’Roll’ thread.
I believe I kicked off with Clifford T Ward’s ‘Wherewithal’ which, apart from the title, includes ‘Nonpareil’.
For that matter ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ gives an honourable and rare mention of Worcestershire.
Indeed I now recall that but can’t find it.
I knew I’d seen it before, and I followed it up a little later
Ry again – “evinced” on “FDR in Trinidad”.
Half Man Half Biscuit’s 1966 And All That may be the only song to mention an unreliable fallopian.
And also the only to mention Lev Yashin and Ferenc Puskas
The one I always think of is in Another Day by The Rutles – pusillanimous.
How about
Ha’ina ‘ia mai ana ka puana
from Warren Zevon’s Hula Boys.
Then there’s this one from Quantum Jump’s The Lone Ranger
Taumatawhakatangihangakoayauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronuky
pokaiwhenuakitanatahu
From http://www.songfacts.com
The song’s first word was chosen after a record label suggestion that the tune was a potential hit single if it had something more catchier for the intro. Turning to a copy of The Guinness Book of World Records, Hine found the world’s longest word, a Māori name for a New Zealand mountain, and sang it in a way to make it sound Native American.
It’s on one of those Emperor Rosko albums. Ace, it is.
Radio Stars “Nervous Wreck” has the chorus line of Electroencephalograph, which is unlikely to feature much elsewhere
Kraftwerk; Electrokardiogram.
Joan Armatrading used the word “mahoot” in Drop the Pilot – a mahoot is someone who ‘drives’ an elephant.
Edwyn Collins gave us “allegorically” in A Girl Like You.
And Pet Shop Boys – Love is a Bourgeois Construct
“I’ve been thinking how I can’t be bothered
to wash the dishes or remake the bed
What’s the point when I could doss instead?”
Doss ! We used to say that a lot in the 70s
Leadbelly wrote “The Bourgeois Blues” in the1930s (The version by Ry Cooder is possibly better known to Afterworders).
——————————————
Me and my wife went all over town
Everywhere we go, the people would turn us down
Lord, in the bourgeois town
Yee it’s a bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around
Me and Martha, we were standing upstairs
I heard a white man sayin’ “I don’t want no niggers up there”
Lord, he’s a bourgeois man
Yee, it’s a bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around
Home of the brave, land of the free
I don’t wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie
Lord, in a bourgeois town
Yes, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
I’m gonna spread the news all around
Me and my wife we went all over town
Everywhere we go, the colored people would turn us down
Lord, in a bourgeois town
Yee it’s a bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
I’m gonna spread the news all around
Them white folks in Washington they know how
To call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow
Lord, it’s a bourgeois town
Ooh, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
I’m gonna spread the news all around
Tell all the colored folks to listen to me
Don’t try to find no home in Washington DC
‘Cause it’s a bourgeois town
Yee, it’s a bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
and I’m still gonna spread the news
——————————————
Gladys Knight sang that “everybody wants to be Bourgie Bourgie” in the ’70s sometime.
Dig the fancy footwork from those Pips. The tubby little one in the middle seems to be particularly enjoying himself.
Brooooce’s ’57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)’ starts ‘I bought a bourgeois house in the Hollywood Hills’.
As a point of order I was referring to the word “doss”.
I probably wasn’t clear enough.
Gertcha
Closely followed by “cowson”.
“Gertchoo Cowson! Gertcha!”
Lou Reed has “circumlocution” in ‘There is no time’.
If hyphenated words count, then XTC have ‘duck-propelled’ in Merely A Man, off Oranges And Lemons.
‘I’m all religious figures rolled into one,
Gaddafi duck-propelled,
From Jimmy Swagert’s tommy-gun.’
Neil Hannon deserves a mention here.
Assume the perpendicular includes the wonderful couplet:
Lavinia loves the lintels – Anna, the architraves
Ben’s impressed by the buttresses thrust up the chapel knave
Pop music is not exactly overcrowded with Jerdacuttup men.
The Triffids called their LP Calenture, referring to the hallucogenic fever that sailor get in the tropics.
What is most impressive is that the above are both stupendous songs. The esoteric vocabulary seems absolutely appropriate.
‘Brunt’ is a word in common parlance but not in song, I would suggest.
As in Zep’s ‘Your Time is Gonna Come’.
‘Verisimilitude’, an actual song title on Teenage Fanclub’s Grand Prix.
Savoir-faire, as used by Prince in ‘7’.
Rhododendron, a nice flower indeed in ‘Do The Strand.
Does Savoir Faire count if it’s used as a title (of a great Chic track) but is in fact an instrumental?
Weirdly I’ve just been watching “Road House” today, which features this song…
Suede had a Savoir Faire. It’s terrible.
Terrible track off a terrible album innit?
I’ve got no time for trivialities
It’s not a long word but it is still unusual in a song, when Bryan Ferry, in Song for Europe, repeatedly passes judgement on Birmingham’s failure to make it as European City of Culture in the year of the songs release. In a rare moment of irony for Ferry, usually felt to be incapable of such, his repeated comment, in a broad approximation of a Birmingham/Black Country accent, of ‘jammy’ is a master stroke, sadly misinterpreted at the time.
Very droll, Retro.
Black Country Bryan! Who’d have thought it!
Surely “Block contray Broyan!”
Orgasmatron by Motörhead features obsequious, sycophant, hypocrisy, paranoia and clandestine.
Michael Nesmith rarely uses any word used by someone else. One of his songs is called Propinquity, and it’s not even in the song.
Shawn Phillips, similarly, never used a word we could understand where he could use one we didn’t. Velleity, f’rinstance.
Ian Dury’s “This is What We Find” is the only song to include the word “jubblified” …. but that’s because he just made it up.
see also “splittingumness”
However, you’ll struggle to find many other musical uses of the widely used ‘shitless’.
‘Shitless and Bible Black’ or did I misread.
Shitless, shitless
Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake
Joanna Newsom uses lots of unusual words in her songs, and luckily, one US site has compiled them all and made a nice article out of it. Hurrah!
https://www.vulture.com/2015/10/joanna-newsom-vocabulary-list.html
Essential reading for all fans of the alluring, duck-voiced, harp-plucking Californian song-thrush.
At this juncture it seems entirely appropriate to suggest this.
You don’t often hear about larders in pop songs. Or Ladas, come to that.
Jake Thackeray has “la-di-da”, if that counts. Ooh! here’s me bus! Tara a bit!
“Got no truck with the la-di-da
Keep my bread in an old fruit jar
Drive you out in a motor car
Getting fat on your lucky star
Just making easy money”
Also in the same song:
Admirers, physique, moccasin, suspenders, throne, appease.
In Talking Hard Work Woody Guthrie uses moccasins, however the moccasins mentioned are water moccasins (a type of snake).
“I’s bit by hungry dogs and I was chewed all to pieces
My water moccasins and rattlesnakes on two river bottoms”
‘Unvanquishable’.
Scritti Politti, Lions After Slumber.
Yeah – but only because the word was nicked out of a Percy Bysshe Shelley poem!
Nik Kershaw’s “Radio Musicola” features “plasticised”, “ideology”, “inclinations” and (my favourite) “numismatical polity”.
Edwin Collins excels at this sort of thing. Off the top of my head: to-whit, paltry, (days of) yore, easy-osy. And has anyone else used ‘ye gods!’ in a chorus?
Comeweskas chickavee – 2 for the price of one – opening line of “thanks for the memory” by
The Mighty Slade.
You live and learn. I always thought it was ‘chickadee’ , as in the WC Fields film ‘My Little Chickadee’.
“Happenstance” – as in You Are My Face by Wilco. Can’t recall hearing that anywhere else in song land.
I think that’s the title of a song by Thousand Yard Stare. They had a few songs titled with unusual words not used in the lyrics, most famously (?) Comeuppance.
Sorry, the Church have a song called Happenstance. With the word Happenstance in the actual lyrics and all. Off Untitled #23 if you’re bothered.
I had that KIlbey on Skype. He didn’t say much worth quoting. He’s “happy” with the new album. I’m much funnier than he is. But he wears great shirts.
Ah thank you Saucy. About 75% done , the new album I believe.
He’s ageing ok “considering.”
Little Feat’s Down Below The Borderline features the word ‘onomatopoetry’.
It’s my favourite word. I just love the way it sounds.
Eurocommunists Scritti Politti sang of “hegemony”, presumably from Antonio Gramsci, which is not a very rock’n roll word
A friend, who is a staunch trade-unionist, wrote a song in the days of Thatcher, mocking the sort of trade-union-speak that union officials invariably came out with in interviews.
“If a boilermaker’s busy making boilers
Pay him boilermaker’s pay
But if he’s hanging doors or working in the spray shop
Let his differentials be eroded away
Cause he does the same job as me
In an ongoing state of financial non-parity
You don’t get me I’m part of the union
And that’s just one of fifty eight
Promoting free collective bargaining
While maintaining the right to independently negotiate
Cause he does the same job as me
And I’ve been doing it for the last thirty three
Years on the trot.
Cause he does the same job as me
And I don’t even stop
For a cup of tea.”
I have in front of me a scrap of paper given to me by the former mayor of Woking, I think it was. I had bleated that I couldn’t find a rhyme for ‘collective bargaining’. He came up with
‘It’s time that we returned to harkening
To the effective worth of collective bargaining’.
Unfortunately, the rest of the song remains unfinished.
Moon Rocks by Talking Heads mentions “transubstantiation”,
While i’m here, Original Concept’s “Get Stupid” mentions the Blackadder favourite “discombobulated”
PS. Eno’s Backwater mentions heuristics. You won’t find that in Liam Gallagher.
If there is a budding songwriter out there, please have I rhyme begging to be shoehorned into a song, hubris and dooberry . Uncertain about the spelling of the second word, to be fair. Was it a Kenny Everett or a Noel Edmonds word, I forget.
I do recall a joke in a rag mag early seventies with a joke about pastor dooberies.
Ah, now I always spelled it ‘doubry’; rhymes with Anna Soubry, you see.
We’ve always used this word in our family to mean “thing you can’t remember the name of right now”, like “thingamajig”. Is this a different word?
I put the TV on
And I saw Anna Soubry
Went to change the channel
Couldn’t find the doobrey
Similarly doobrey firkin.
Definitely a thingamajig.
“Thingumybob” by the Black Dyke Mills Band was Apple Records single #4…any relation?
Big hit for Gracie Fields back in the day. File under “Unaccountably Popular Things That Are Shit”
My favourite Crimble ditty has a few suitable words for this thread. Even has one in the title.
.
..and of course there’s what the coconut ladies sing in the background here.
The first one I want to hear performed by Chris Eubank.
…I’m so sorry.
Tho thorry, thurely?
I know, I know – not big and not clever.
The very wonderful Johanna Warren invokes “decocted” on the magickal Rose Potion…
HMHB have a few but I like this
“But what’s a park if you can’t see a linnet?”
They use “bonce” later in the song too.
Oh there’s linnets all over the folk scene, if nothing else for the number of times The Galway Shawl gets sung.
There’s a “cock linnet” in ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van.’
I’ll see your “linnet” and raise you some “curlews”, as found in Brian Eno’s “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More”.
The nuthatch puts in an appearance in “Eyes of the World” by the Grateful Dead, too.
Ewan McColl clearly liked curlews, and how right he was. He snuck them into the lyrics of both The Manchester Rambler and The Joy of Living.
The sound of Northern moors.
What a splendidly entertaining thread this is!
It’s certainly made me put on my “thinking cap”!
And taken me for an enjoyable stroll down “Memory Lane”!
(Are we there yet? Still on 94? That can’t be right.)
I thought I’d add a few words that to my knowledge have only been used once in a “Pop Song”!
Here goes the first one!
(Are we there yet?)
“Pederasty” from that Saucy Sixties Musical “Hair”!
(This should be 98, I think, Hubes …)
Oh dear. I can’t offhand think of another. Still – you must have your hamper by now!
99 problems…
If you like big buttresses of words, you’re better off with Jay Z than Kenny G:
https://lab.musixmatch.com/largest_vocabulary/
I like big buttresses and I cannot lie.
The season’s started early this year…
Genesis have form.
The Colony of Slippermen – slubberdegullions
Firth of Fifth – undinal
Dancing with the Moonlit Knight – unifaun
The Return of the Giant Hogweed – Heracleum mantegazziani
Not forgetting Father Tiresias, The Lamia, The Fountain of Salmacis, etc
Hurrah I await the hamper with anticipation, thank you must be due to @H-P-Saucecraft without his tireless dedication to putting food on my table.
I only hope that CORSAIR TINNED CHICKEN will change your life as it has mine, Hubes.
Sellotape dispenser.
Richard Dawson engaging in product placement, maybe?
Only 94 to the next food parcel.
There’s a few in I am the Walrus. Walrus and pilchard for starters.
Mmmmh! Walrus and pilchard!
Heston Blumenthal has excelled himself!
I speak of the pompatous of love.
When the Beastie Boys famously christened the haircut of the gods as the mullet on Ill Communication it was probably its first use of the word in song.
A late entry.
“I wake up every morning with a smile upon my face
My natural exuberance spills out all over the place”.
Haven’t seen “exuberance” used anywhere else. There may well be other Diamond Words elsewhere in Neil Innes’ song catalogue.
As Ron Nasty wrote in the Rutles’ song Another Day.
“You’re so pusillanimous, oh, yeah
Nature’s calling, and I must go there”
Just had a memory reminder on Facebook about Alfred Jarry (8 September 1873 – 1 November 1907), French writer best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), who also invented the term and philosophical concept of ‘pataphysics (“the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”).
Pataphysical; I’d heard that before, or near enough, in song.
Of course Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.
Joan was quizzical, studied pataphysical science (probably the best bit of the whole song)
The Soft Machine Volume Two. My favourite album of theirs despite the iffy production.
Side One: Rivmic Melodies:
Pataphysical Introduction-Pt.I
A Concise British Alphabet-Pt.I
Hibou, Anemone and Bear
A Concise British Alphabet-Pt.II
Hulloder
Dada Was Here
Thank You Pierrot Lunaire
Have You Ever Bean Green?
Pataphysical Introduction-Pt.II
Out Of Tunes
The Soft Machine Volume Two. My favourite album of theirs despite the iffy production.
Side One: Rivmic Melodies:
Pataphysical Introduction-Pt.I
A Concise British Alphabet-Pt.I
Hibou, Anemone and Bear
A Concise British Alphabet-Pt.II
Hulloder
Dada Was Here
Thank You Pierrot Lunaire
Have You Ever Bean Green?
Pataphysical Introduction-Pt.II
Out Of Tunes
.
Now you say you’re lonely
You cry the whole night thorough
Well, you can cry me a river, cry me a river
I cried a river over you
Now you say you’re sorry
For bein’ so untrue
Well, you can cry me a river, cry me a river
I cried a river over you
You drove me, nearly drove me out of my head
While you never shed a tear
Remember, I remember all that you said
Told me love was too plebeian
Told me you were through with me and
Now you say you love me
Well, just to prove you do
Come on and cry me a river, cry me a river
I cried a river over you
Lyrics by Arthur Hamilton
The Magnetic Fields, from “All My Little Words”:
“Now that you’ve made me want to die
You tell me that you’re unboyfriendable”
Unboyfriendable. Is that even a word?
It is now.