Words you learned from rock or pop

Cafe Society
21

Is it “Workshop of the Telescopes” by Blue Öyster Cult?

  • By Silverfish Imperatrix, whose incorrupted eye
    Sees through the charms of doctors and their wives
    By Salamander, Drake, and the power that was Undine
    Rise to claim Saturn, ring and sky
    By those who see with their eyes closed
    They know me by my black telescope *
22

Philippic, Desultory (after I was Robert McNamara’d into submission)

23

I learned “copacetic” from the Velocity Girl album name. More that spring immediately to mind:

p-p-p-pneumothorax*
bergamot, vetiver (I’ve forgotten what they precisely are, but I think they’re flowers and/or herbs)
poxy pinball

*I was on a road trip soon after this song/CD came out. Person A put the CD on in the car. Person B said “Ah, the ______ ______” – except he changed the last word of the band’s name to reference a recent Snickers commercial. Person A replied with the catchphrase from said commercial. I assumed that what person B said was the band’s actual name. It took until getting Guitar Hero III three years later (which had one of their songs as a bonus track) and seeing the name “misspelled” to go online to see who else had noticed the error – and then, after everyone else was “misspelling” it, going back to my copy of that CD to see that I had been wrong all that time. :smack:

24

Colitas. Like Cecil, I always assumed it to be a dessert flower.

25

Tessellate from the song of the same name by Alt-J

"Scylla and Charybdis " from the Police’s Wrapped Around Your Finger I wasn’t aware of the term “saloon” as a style of car until Queen sang about it in Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy

26

Myxomatosis from Radiohead

27

Gavotte - You’re So Vain

28

Proselytized - BS&T “I Can’t Quit Her”

29

Remembered a couple from R.E.M.

From Can’t Get There From Here - shirr and philomath

From Find the River - bergamot and vetiver

30

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

31

Raison d’etre - Queensryche

32

Helter skelter.

33

This is an interesting one. I had always known the general meaning as disorganized or in disarray, but later learned that it is also a British term for a spiral-shaped playground slide. The Beatles song made much more sense after I learned that!

34

Contrecoup, limerent and craniosophic.

35

Oooeeeoooahahtingtangwallawallabingbang

36

Not precisely words, but I first heard the phrase “cross the rubicon” in Journey’s Rubicon, and the song “Moon Over Bourbon Street” made me seek out and read “Interview With a Vampire”

37

Well…I didn’t think I’d be ninja’ed on that one.

Side note. When the jukebox at the bar gets a little too country, I like sneaking that one in.
More Zevon - Chemin de fer - Mr. Bad Example

38

SNL and Woody Harrelson taught me “callipygous.”

39

Parthenogenesis, from Shriekback’s Nemesis.

40

Love that album.