This is the allusionist in which I, Helen Salzman, besieged language, put its left leg in.

It's left leg out, in, out, in, out, shake it all about.

I'm doing a run of episodes with other radio topians, so which one will be joining me today?

You're listening to song exclusionist, I'm Rishi Keishirui.

He takes songs apart and scrabbles around, looking for meaning in the innards.

It's my radio topian sibling.

Rishi Keishirui from song exploder.

I won't do that again.

Rishi of course knows a lot about songwriting, so I wanted to ask him about a particular category

of words, vocables.

That aren't really words actually, but rather, loan some phonemes or non-word noises

that behave a little like words.

In normal speech, vocables perform various functions.

For instance, arm and arm, bias time to think and paper over cracks in our phrases.

And babies testing out their vocal cords tend to be pretty keen on the vocables.

Not sure they have a wealth of alternatives at that stage, to be honest.

So in speech, vocables aren't necessarily meaningful or consequential or even intentional,

but in song, they can be all these things.

All those la la la, and dumb didums and bomb bomb bomb, the doobie doobie doos, they're

ubiquitous in songs.

So what are they doing there?

It's different from scatting, which is sort of an improvised thing in a song where somebody

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