Certain things can be counted without a parsing device, for example four-syllable words in rock n’ roll songs. I have often wondered why there are so many one syllable words in rock songs, and have a pet theory for this. Rock lyrics favor Anglo-Saxon words rather than Latinate words — the former have a more direct, less fussy sound — and since the Latinate words tend to be multi-syllabic compounds, multi-syllabic words (say, more than three syllables) tend to be very rare in rock music. Why exactly the monosyllable is appropriate to rock is something I cannot explain, although it may be related to another pattern I have observed: countries that underwent the Protestant Reformation seem to be the most adept at producing (not necessarily consuming) rock music, particularly heavy metal. Perhaps there is a connection here between Northern European linguistic practices (and the persistence of Anglo-Saxon forms) and the predisposition to religious violence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one that prepares these countries for immersion in a subsequent musical form like rock n’ roll.<\/p>\n
In any event, I’d like to know what the longest Latinate word is that has been successfully used in a rock song. My candidate (based on popularity, not length) would be “satisfaction,” as in, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Certain things can be counted without a parsing device, for example four-syllable words in rock n’ roll songs. I have often wondered why there are so many one syllable words in rock songs, and have a pet theory for this. Rock lyrics favor Anglo-Saxon words rather than Latinate words — the former have a more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2819,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions\/2819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}