The iTunes corpus

I can't live without music. More importantly, I can't write without it. It feeds me. An iPod is a thousand muses in your pocket. When working on a vibrant, energetic tone of voice, I have a specific playlist full of bouncy, hollertastic toons that leave me wanting to headbut things, drive too fast and scribble like a weasel. It's difficult to write upbeat with downbeat accompaniment.

While working on my last blog (about how some formal terms may be widely understood), I remembered that Substitute (one of those terms) by The Who is on my kneebouncing inyerface playlist. And some dedicated iPod stroking reveals more difficult-but-familiar terms. A quick trawl throws up Substitute for love by Madonna too. Another five minutes brings up delusions, apologies (quick! change it to sorry!), severance, sensuality, frustrations, crystalline, consequence, distractions, evolution, inertia, constellation, indigenous and lucidity.

The word formation is phenomenal. Beetlebum, anyone? Bodyrock? Cloudbusting? Hyperballad? Karmacoma? Sinsuality? Wearchest? Hooverphonic? There are Greek affixes in there, for goodness' sake. There are references to scentific theory (My selfish gene), sideways swipes at Shakespeare (Midsummer night's dreamin') and even - whisper who dares - Latin (Deus ibi est by Isobel Campbell, even if she does have a strange way of pronouncing 'est').

Juicy juxtapositions form a rich seam. Moonlight and mescaline, Morphine and chocolate, Goldfish and paracetamol, Coffee and TV.... perhaps I should rank them by active ingredient. I haven't even touched on the close-snipped poetry of some titles - Deep honey, Crawling with idiot, Indigenous syringes. And these are just the titles.*

I've chosen popular-ish artists from a middlebrow collection - I'm sure it would be easy to create a far more esoteric list. But I don't think I've ever seen an article exclaiming at the complexity of song titles or the literacy issues inherent in visiting HMV. Admittedly iTunes and Amazon - bless their hearts - help us out with a typo-spotting 'Did you really mean 'Argtyk Mynkkies'?' feature, which suggests that enough mis-spellings occur to warrant attention. And I know that you don't have to understand where Bohemia is or what a Rhapsody might be to appreciate the song. But it does show that our 'language environment' is liberally peppered with these complex terms and enigmatic metaphors. iTunes is only one example; every day we may use a 'percolator', make a 'connection', pay a 'congestion' charge or pick up a 'prescription' without breaking a Latin-phobic sweat.

I'm hardly suggesting trying out terms in iTunes before replacing them with simpler versions. Only that our (my) gut instinct to plain English any polysyllabically miscreant word can be tempered sometimes. Maybe. Carefully. A bit. But don't quote me.

*An honourable mention, by the way, when discussing song (and band) titles, has to go to 'If I had £1 for every stale song title I'd be 30 short of getting out of this mess' by Get cape. Wear cape. Fly.