Tag Archives: interest-music
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8 Music Festival Names That Rock
Like their spiritual forerunner Woodstock, these multi-day blowouts are known for three things: loud music, scant clothing, and names as catchy as a classic rock hook. Here are eight of the biggest festivals and a bit of history behind their lyrical appellations.
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Why Are Singing Groups Called “Glee Clubs”?
These infamously chipper singing groups are called glee because the melding of voices makes everyone happy, right? Actually, joy has little to do with it. Why are they really called glee clubs? Yes, one definition of glee is “open delight or pleasure,” e.g., The students ran out of the building on the last day of school with glee.Glee derives from the Old English glēo, meaning “mirth, jesting, …
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What Kind Of Songs Get To Be Called “Country Music”?
by Ashley Austrew What comes to mind when we say country music? Pickup trucks and cowboy hats? Garth Brooks and Patsy Cline? How about West African string instruments and Atlanta-based hip-hop? Past and present, country music—and what gets to be called country music—is far more complex than many realize. What is country music? Country music is defined as “a style and genre of largely string-accompanied American popular …
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What’s It Called When You Misinterpret Lyrics?
What is a mondegreen? Have you ever heard someone sing the wrong lyrics to a song? Maybe a child gave the nursery rhyme “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” a new meaning by replacing the line “life is but a dream” with “life’s a butter dream.” Or maybe you’ve unironically belted out “Excuse me while I kiss this guy,” instead of Jimi Hendrix’s intended lyrics, “Excuse me …
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Why Did These 10 Songs Go Viral?
A look at the slang and pop culture terms from songs to figure out why these annoyingly catchy songs went viral.
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Who Wrote The Alphabet Song?
Whether you learned your ABCs while hanging out with the gang from Sesame Street, from someone in your family, or you were schooled in everything from A to Z in kindergarten, you probably learned the alphabet with the help of the alphabet song. The clever tune is imprinted in the brains of most of us English speakers. When you look up a word in the …
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Belligerent And Other Trending Words On Dictionary.com
From Kpop idols to California weed growers, here are the news stories that had you asking, “Hey, what does that word mean?” during the week of August 17–24, 2018. Idol South Korean Kpop group BTS is known for its mix of English and Korean in its songs, spurring curiosity from fans on either side of the language divide. The band’s latest music video, IDOL, is …
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Last Month in Pop Language: “This Is America” And Other May #1’s
by Molly Rosen MarrinerIt’s another installment of Last Month in Pop Language, a column where the most popular (statistically) song, book, and film of the month will have their words analyzed in hopes of drawing a conclusion about language’s current usage—and future. At the end of each monthly column, we’ll draw a conclusion: Was last month’s pop language masterly, malevolent, or merely meh? Film: Avengers: Infinity War Avengers: Infinity …