Sea shanties


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I love finding out about traditional music from all over the world. That’s why this article on the ABC news website caught my eye over the weekend.

In the Cornwall (see map) there was a very strong tradition of folk music and many traditional Cornish songs travelled the world with the expert sailors from that part of the country.

There was some interesting English vocabulary in this article, too. The first phrase I piece of vocabulary I spotted was to ‘net a deal’. This means to secure or get a deal.

The next interesting vocabulary I saw was this phrase: ‘sea shanties’. A ‘sea shanty’ is a song sung by sailors while they are at sea or sometimes when they come back to land.

One more interesting word I spotted later in the article was ‘roster’. A roster is a list of names. In this case, the list of artists signed to that particular record label.

The last expression I would like to look at is ‘to storm the charts’. In this case, ‘to storm’ means to dominate and the ‘chart’ are the records of how many copies of a particular single or album have been sold.