Tag Archives: youth

Shorties

Words and Music

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Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, and its 1993 addenda, includes approximately 470,000 words.

It is calculated that 171,146 of those words are in common use. (Words that are in uncommon use are things like lunting, or walking while smoking a pipe, a word that you’ll now want to use although are unlikely to find an opportunity to do so.)

Shakespeare used more than 20,000 words, invented some 1,700 (including bedroom, critic, fashionable, gossip, kissing, lonely, rant, undress and worthless, which themselves could be worked into some clever poem).  The Folger Shakespeare Library has it that he wrote “at least 38 plays and over 150 short and long poems.”

Let’s say that back in Shakespeare’s day there were a total 400,000 words. This means that he used 5% of all of the available words in the English language to write what are widely considered some of the best works in the English language.

While you consider that, you might go lunting.

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Articles

Then Play On

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Consider. While there is certainly a percentage of rock in its multitudinous forms that is all about being pissed off and rebellious, about being disaffected and morose, about being loose and large, a greater percentage, arguably, is about relationships. Love lost. Love won. Love unrequited. Love that’s not really love. Love that dare not speak its name. Love sought but not found (which can lead to many of the feelings previously mentioned, as in pissed off, etc.).

Music (let’s stop using the word rock here as it can be too loaded as it can encompass too much, and the more generic term allows the focus to be on the argument, not the terms thereof) to a teen helps describe and define relationships or the lack thereof. Say you see a person of the opposite sex for the first time and you are immediately smitten. Chances are, if there is music playing, it is a song that you’re not likely to forget—at least not unless or until you meet someone else who wipes away the memory of the first one. Say she—and, yes, I am exhibiting my bias here, just to make this less prolix—has a song that’s her favorite. Now depending on your taste in music, there is a good likelihood that that is going to be among your favorites, as well. If you find it to be completely abhorrent, chances are there are going to have to be some rather significant factors that are going to overcome what you now know is a horrible taste in music, as you ask yourself: “If she likes that, what else can she possibly like?”, a question that causes your eyes to go wide with fear, despite the fact that you are talking to yourself.

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