Improve Your Vocab

If you listen to ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ by the Charlie Daniel’s Band there’s a line that reads:

Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard

After years of listening to this I’d always wondered by ‘rosin up your bow’ meant.

The word rosin is the key part to the phrase, and rosin refers to a substance used to treat the bows of stringed instruments (including a fiddle as heard in the tune). Rosin itself is the solid amber residue that remains after turpentine oleoresin or naptha from pine trees is destilled. Rosin is not just used for bow strings, it’s also used in adhesives, varnishes, inks and, in powdered form, as an anti-slip agent (similar to the use of chalk in weightlifting or gymnastics).

Wikipedia has an excellent page that goes into more detail.

Have you ever watched a film, listened to music, read a book or watched TV and come across a word or phrase that you didn’t know before. HAve you ever wondered what a particular word or phrase from one those sources meant, and wanted to know more than you could find out from a dictionary?

Perhaps you misheard the word or phrase, and now can’t find an entry for it?

That’s what Improve Your Vocab is designed for!

Partly for my own edification, this website is designed to provide information on those words and phrases that I come across in the material I watch and listen to. The blog is designed to help me document what Ifind so that I can remember it and, hopefully, in the process make the information useful to other people.

The website will provide information on English and other language words and phrases, including where the expression came from, derivations and an original source for the expression.

If you have a suggestion for a word or expression, please feel free to write to us using the Contact Us link.