I've just realised that it's a perfect example of an iambic pentameter with a feminine ending. Good writer, isn't he?

Another good writer makes it three:

http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs?filter0=%20baffled&op0=word

Although she may be cute she's just a substitute
'Cos you're the permanent one

Permanent - maybe it's been used elsewhere, but not that often. And not as well.

In the Edwyn Collins' single "A Girl Like You" he uses the word "allegorically" for the first and possibly only time in the history of popular music.

Also, Kid Creole's backing singers (the Coconuts) in "Annie I'm Not Your Daddy" seem to repeatedly sing "ono-ono-onomatopoeia", which would have made the song even better.

"Team by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing! Fine, then"

From "Its the End of the World etc etc etc"
What's the verse form here, Lucas?

Much as I love New Order, Bernard Sumner isn't a lyricist I'd see myself positing alongside Dylan, Cohen and the like. However, the first thing that came to mind was the opening line to True Faith:

"I feel so extraordinary / something's got a hold on me".

In the context of the song, 'extraordinary' is a brilliant choice, and the stresses are absolutely spot on. It might be an example of trochaic tetrameter, but I'm not sure - don't think it's iambic. Not that any of this matters. It's just a great line / verse / song.

It sounds so Shakespearean, doesn't it - "the baffl'd King".

As for the metre, yes, Cohen gets it dead right throughout the song. Another good example is "It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah", where "and it's a" are really just filler syllables to make it scan, but the effect is to separate and isolate the two adjectives as two distinct concepts much more effectively than "a cold, broken Hallelujah" would have.

Even the rhymes are top notch - e.g. "marble arch/vict'ry march".

"Book of Longing", the most recent book by LC, which is a mish mash of jottings, doodles, poems and (later used as) lyrics. I bought it for Mrs Path, a complete convert to all things LC since his NEC gig in November, at Christmas. It shows quite what a tortured soul he is, I believe.
More accessible than his early novels. Cohen lite(ish), if you will.

David Sylvian uses inexorabaly (its the only time i've heard that used in music) in the track "The Devil's Own".

"The ticking of the clock
Inexorably goes on".

Notable mention of "Verisimilitude" by Teenage Fanclub in the song of that name as well.

"You're one microscopic cog
In his catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by his red right hand." (Nick Cave)

"Two lovers kissing amongst the screams at midnight,
Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude." (The Jam)

Key words: microscopic, catastrophic, tranquility, solitude.
Write them in your exercise book.

from Yankee Go Home by the outstanding Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Not sure I have heard 'Nicoise' anywhere else, though doubtless I am wrong.

...clutching her handkerchief' from She's Leaving Home.

Clutching is so perfect for the line, just the right amoutn of extra detail, and I can't remember anyone else using it. There can't be many who have used handkerchief either...

I know Lennon generally gets the props for lyrics in the Beatles, but I reckon She's Leaving Home matches any of them.

He doesn't get enough credit for his command of the language. See "Little Queenie" where he sings "If it's a slow song we'll omit it".
*Omit*? Brilliant.

I've often thought the following lyric contained more than it's share of 'unusual' words - at least 2 in each verse:

Foreign Affair by Tom waits

when travelling abroad in the continental style
it's my belief one must attempt to be discreet
and subsequently bear in mind your transient position
allows you a perspective that's unique

though you'll find your itinerary's a blessing and a curse
your wanderlust won't let you settle down
and you'll wonder how you ever fathomed that you'd be content
to stay within the city limits of a small midwestern town

most vagabonds i knowed don't ever want to find the culprit
that remains the object of their long relentless quest
the obsession's in the chasing and not the apprehending
the pursuit you see and never the arrest

without fear of contradiction bon voyage is always hollered
in conjunction with a handkerchief from shore
by a girl that drives a rambler and furthermore
is overly concerned that she won't see him anymore

planes and trains and boats and buses
characteristically evoke a common attitude of blue
unless you have a suitcase and a ticket and a passport
and the cargo that they're carrying is you

a foreign affair juxtaposed with a stateside
and domestically approved romantic fancy
is mysteriously attractive due to circumstances knowing
it will only be parlayed into a memory

(apologies to m'learned friends for the purloining of copyright material)

Aimee Mann is rightly renowned for her articulacy and linguistic precision. She not only used "acquiesce" in a song way before Noel Gallagher made such a fanfare of doing so, but deployed it perfectly:

"It gets so embarassing, so I acquiesce
And I change my mind again - you change your address."

That song, Believed You Were Lucky, also has a great last line: "Life could be fucking great!"

Anyway, the single-use word I really wanted to highlight in today's lecture is "quell" - as in

"It's one of my faults that I can't quell my past
I ought to have gotten it gone."
(4th of July)

In the first line we have the use of the mot juste; in the second, a beautifully chosen, gramatically calamitous construction which works much better than saying it in "proper English" would have done. Full marks.

Grey’s the colour of the pious
Knelt upon the misericord

(Outside of the Inside)

Misericord. That's Misericord. I doubt 'pious' and 'knelt' are wheeled out too often either.

Prompted by the letters page darling Archie (2 this issue!), the substitute for knowledge is ignorance.
Sometimes it works:
"Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can't even think of a word that rhymes"/Alice Cooper
Sometimes it doesn't:
"I bought a ticket to the world
But now Ive come back again
Why do I find it hard to write the next line
When I want the truth to be said"/Spandau Ballet

Remind me of the other songs about the "art and angst" of songwritery.......(No EJ, please, he's just taupin' away)

“Common enough in conversation but seldom heard in songs” (to quote Archie’s definition of what counts for this thread).

A lot of pop records deal with the ups and downs of romance, lovers tiffs and all that, but they tend to be pitched at the more histrionic end of the scale, with language to match.
One of the most common phrases that must crop up in these situations is surely “why can’t you be just a little more thoughtful?”
The only song I know of with failure to be sufficiently “thoughtful” on the rap sheet is Mary Love’s Let Me Know. It’s in the second bridge.

From Want Ads by the Honey Cone:

Wanted: young man single and free.
Experience in love preferred, but will accept a young trainee.

And from Darling Be Home Soon by The Lovin’ Spoonful:

Darling be home soon,
I couldn’t bear to wait an extra minute if you dawdle.

‘Trainee’ and ‘dawdle’ - have they ever been used anywhere else?

I believe that long time Warren Zevon supporter David Letterman was pretty sure that no one else had used the word "brucellosis" in a song. However, a couple of my favourites pop up in Porcelain Monkey, one of two songs he wrote about Elvis Presley:

Hip-shakin' shoutin' in gold lame
That's how he earned his regal sobriquet
Then he threw it all away
For a porcelain monkey

Left behind by the latest trends
Eating fried chicken with his regicidal friends
That's how the story ends
With a porcelain monkey

'sobriquet' and 'regicidal' being my nominations for this thread.

Fourth day, five day marathon,
We're moving like a parallelogram,
Don't move, I'll shut the door and kill the lights,
If I can't be wrong I must be right

Motorhead / Hawkwind

Two memorable Nick Cave-isms, firstly from "Nature Boy":

"I was walking around the flower show like a leper
Coming down with some kind of nervous hysteria
When I saw you standing there, green eyes, black hair
Up against the pink and purple wisteria"

And then from "Abattoir Blues":

"I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed
I woke up this morning with a frappuccino in my hand"

The sheer nausea with which he pronounces "frappuccino" is worth the admission price alone.

Moving on to Neil Tennant, from PSB's "I Made My Excuses And Left":

"In the crowded court of your love, I was now a supplicant"

Ian Dury's "If I Was With A Woman"

"If I was with a woman she'd have to learn to cherish
The purity and depth of my disdain"

and "What A Waste":
"I could be the teacher in a classroom full of scholars
I could be the sergeant in a squadron full of wallahs...

...I could be a lawyer with stratagems and ruses
I could be a doctor with poultices and bruises"

And finally, Sparks, "Talent Is An Asset":

"Talent is relative, that's hypothetical
We are his relatives, that parenthetical"

From "Cry Me A River" the narrator of the song quotes their lover as saying...

"Told me love was too plebian"

What an arsehole! I'd want him to hurt too.

I dreamed you were a cosmonaut
of the space between our chairs
And I was a cartographer
of the tangles in your hair

I sang the song that silence sings
It's the one that everybody knows, everybody knows
The song that silence sings
And this is how it goes

These looms that weave apocrypha
they're hanging from a strand
The dark and empty rooms were full
of incandescent hands

The awkward pause
The fatal flaw
Time, it's a crooked bow
Time is a crooked bow

In time you need to learn, to love
The ebb just like the flow
Grab hold of your bootstraps, and pull like hell
until gravity feels sorry for you, and lets you go
As if you lack the proper chemicals to know
the way it felt the last time you let yourself fall this low

Time's a crooked bow
Time's a crooked bow
Time, it's a crooked bow

Fifty-five and three-eighths years later
At the bottom of a gigantic crater
An armchair calls to you
Yeah, and armchair calls to you
It says, someday, we'll get back at them all
With epoxy and a pair of pliers
As ancient sea slugs begin to crawl
through the ragweed and barbed wire

You didn't write
You didn't call
It didn't cross your mind at all
Through the waves
waves of hay and straw
You couldn't feel a thing at all
Fifty-five and three-eighths
Time
Fifty-five and three-eighths
Time
Time

From memory..

Something So right:

When somethings so right
It's likely to lose me
It's apt to confuse me
Because it's such an unusual sight
Oh no I can't get used to something so right

simple word pivotal in the lyrics - just wouldn't have been anywhere near as good with anything else

The kitchen has been ransacked
ski trails in the hall
a chicken has been dhansacked
and thrown against the wall

John Cooper Clarke - The Day My Pad Went Mad

I'm surprised no-one's nominated this:

I play along with the charade,
there doesn't seem to be
a reason to change
You know, I feel so dirty
when they start talking cute
I wanna tell her that I love her,
but the point is probably moot

"Jessie's Girl" Rick Springfield

(I always thought the "baffled king" was the "barefoot king")

I'm very much in agreement with the comment lauding Aimee Mann's lyrics. Consider the following (from 'Ghost World') which not only features the only - in my knowledge - use of the word 'gibbous' in popular song, but rather beautifully captures a mood :

12th of June, a gibbous moon
was this the longest day?
I'll walk down to the bay
and jump off of the dock and watch
the summer waste away.

From The Hollies "He ain't heavy, he's my brother" -
"He would not encumber me..He ain't heavy etc"
I don't think even Len has used encumber.
Unless others know better.....

Never forget that Cohen is first and foremost a poet and writer. The music was almost an afterthought to his published work.
I'm overjoyed with all the cash he's making on this after getting his retirement funds ripped off by his accountant several years ago.
He's in his 70s and I'd still do him....even if he says: " I ache in all the places I used to play."

I'd be pretty amazed if anyone other than Shriekback (in "NEMESIS") have managed to work "parthenogenesis" into a song.

There are plenty of unusual words from Nigel Blackwell, I particularly like conglomorate and peripheral both in "We made this village from a trad.arr tune." but almost any song will contain at least one.

Not in a lyric maybe, but Parthenogenesis is the title of a 20 minute aglommeration on Canned Heat's Living the Blues from 1968

undinal these days, as in "undinal songs urge the sailors on, til lured by the siren's cry" from "Firth of Fifth", a Tony Banks tune.

He later trumped that by using "bread bin", another much neglected tool in the songwriter's box of spanners, in "All In A Mouse's Night", before tossing aside the latest Argos catalogue and going back to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable.