This blog is for everyone who uses words.

The ordinary-sized words are for everyone, but the big ones are especially for children.



Tuesday 10 October 2017

Thing To Be Today: in unison.

Do you want to stand out from the crowd, or do you fancy being in unison with everybody else?

Well, it depends, obviously. If the crowd is filling the South Stand of Manchester City's Etihad Stadium then standing out by bellowing:

Hello! Hello!
We are the busby boys
Hello! Hello!
We are the busby boys
And if you are a City fan surrender or you'll die,
We all follow United

would be an act of extreme folly.

On the other hand I can see that joining in with:

Blue moon
You saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own.

might be hugely uplifting.

In my family, when any of us accidentally said something in unison, my mother would always insist on us making a wish and then saying the name of a poet. If you said Goldsmith then your wish would apparently come true through money (gold, geddit?). If you said Shakespeare then your wish would come true through violence. 

My insistence upon saying Emily Bronte or TS Eliot was possibly the reason why it never worked for me.

But anyway, do join in if you hear any singing. It lifts the spirits remarkably. 

But you have to do your best to sing at exactly the same pitch as the others, or it doesn't count.

Thing To Be Today: in unison. This word comes from the Latin ūnisonus. The uni- bit means one, and sonus sound.




No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are very welcome, but please make them suitable for The Word Den's family audience.