A wonderful day to you, lovely listener, and a warm welcome to this installment of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloqents. Buh boom, buh boom - can you hear that, dear friends? If you can, today’s word might just apply to you, because today’s word is: rubatosis.

Rubatosis is word meaning ‘the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat, whose tenuous muscular throbbing feels less like a metronome than a nervous ditty your heart is tapping to itself, the kind that people compulsively hum or sing while walking in complete darkness, as if to casually remind the outside world, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.’ The definition you just heard comes from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, and was posted in 2012. The word is supposedly from ‘rubato’ meaning ‘a tempo in which strict timing is relaxed, the music being played near, but not on, the beat’ and ‘sis’ which refers to ‘forming nouns of action or process’. The word ‘rubato’ comes from the Italian word for ‘robbed or stolen’, and gives to the aforementioned meaning ‘since the time is "borrowed"’. Indeed, the word rubato is mentioned in music where the musician should play ‘near, but not on, the beat’. 

Another great Italian term used in music to refer to tempo is ‘a piacere’ which instructs the musician to play ‘at their own discretion with regard to tempo and rhythm; literally ‘at pleasure’. The word ‘piacere’ is Italian for ‘to be pleasing to’ or ‘to be fond of’, and as such was adapted to relate to the musical tempo of the performer’s choosing. There is also

‘ma non troppo’ which means ‘not too much’. It is used to indicate that the basic tempo should be reigned in to a degree; for example, adagio ma non troppo to means ‘slow, but not too slow’. In Italian, ‘troppo’ means ‘too much’. Interestingly, in Australian colloquial language, ‘going troppo’ refers to someone being crazy, or going too far.

Isn’t language wonderful?

Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber

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