Broadway Vocabulary Lesson

isinglass

/izingglaass/

noun: 1 a kind of gelatin obtained from fish. 2 (chiefly US) mica or a similar material in thin transparent sheets.

— ORIGIN alteration, by association with GLASS, of obsolete Dutch huysenblas ‘sturgeon’s bladder’

Taught me something, ChrisLovesShows. I am rather fond of dictionaries. This definition 2 is a little better. From the Compact Oxford English Dictionary. Plus the origins of words can fascinate a word lover...

Updated On: 1/7/06 at 10:25 PM

"And I'll appear in a lavaliere that goes all the way down to my waist."
I looked this up too, way back in 1975, When I was only young and ignorant as well.
(I hope that doesn't sound like a dis to anyone, It's simply a self observation.)

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I thought that one was pretty self-explanatory.

Harder ones?

I have looked up almost all the words used during Spelling Bee. Does that count?

My friend remebered some great ones from "I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major-General," including:

"I'm very good at integral and differential calculus;
I know the scientific names of beings animalcules
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General."

animalcules - A microscopic or minute organism, such as an amoeba or paramecium

"I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's;
I answer hard acrostics; I've a pretty taste for paradox,"

acrostic - A poem or series of lines in which certain letters, usually the first in each line, form a name, motto, or message when read in sequence

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Updated On: 1/9/06 at 05:58 PM

Music Man has a million great vocabulary words, but here's one little sequence:

"They'll be tryin' out bevos, tryin' out cubebs, tryin' out tailor-mades like cigarette fiends. And braggin' all about how they tried to cover up their telltale breath with Sen-sen."

Bevos, cubebs, and tailor-mades were all different kinds of hand-rolled cigarettes, and Sen-sen was a tiny, very powerful breath freshener

We get these two gems from "Maria" from The Sound of Music:

How do you solve a problem like Maria?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means Maria?
A flibbertijibbet! A will-o'-the wisp! A clown!

will-o'-the wisp - a delusive or elusive goal; a deceptive goal or hope; a light that sometimes appears in the night over marshy ground and is often attributable to the combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter (IGNIS FATUUS).

flibbertigibbet - A silly, scatterbrained, or garrulous person; a silly flighty person; a gossip or chatterbox.

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Updated On: 1/12/06 at 09:12 PM

Little Shop of Horrors:
"Shang-a-lang, feel the strum and drang in the air..."

Strum und Drang: Storm and Stress, movement in German literature that flourished from c.1770 to c.1784. It takes its name from a play by F. M. von Klinger, Wirrwarr; oder, Sturm und Drang (1776). The ideas of Rousseau were a major stimulus of the movement, but it evolved more immediately from the influence of Herder, Lessing, and others. With Sturm und Drang, German authors became cultural leaders of Europe, writing literature that was revolutionary in its stress on subjectivity and on the unease of man in contemporary society. The movement was distinguished also by the intensity with which it developed the theme of youthful genius in rebellion against accepted standards, by its enthusiasm for nature, and by its rejection of the rules of 18th-century neoclassical style.

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hmm... haven't gotten that far in music history yet... we're still stuck on chants and the Mass (which reminds me, I should be reading my textbook... lol). But in that part, I'm pretty sure it's not minor or tense at all... It's actually, hmm, what would it be called, Doo-wap, mebbe? It's the three girls that narrate the show that are singing this at the opening.

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Nice one Elsie! I had to dig up the thread when I thought of this one:

From "One" from A Chorus Line:

She walks into a room
And you know
She's un-commonly rare, very unique,
Peripatetic, poetic and chic.

paripatetic - 1 capitalized : ARISTOTELIAN (of or relating to the Greek philosopher Aristotle or his philosophy)
2 of, relating to, or given to walking; moving or traveling from place to place; ITINERANT
(from www.m-w.com)

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