The words music gives us

By Jess Santacroce
Music Writer, 955 the Heat, Phoenix Radio 
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 Music fans know that music itself is vital to our lives. We use it for everything from marking our happiest moments in life to helping us through the worst, expressing our opinions, or even just setting a mood or providing entertainment. We even know that music has permeated our language, with expressions such as “like a broken record,” describing someone who talks about the same thing all the time or repeats the same information, or “music to my ears,” to refer to hearing something you wanted to hear. But there are a few words or phrases even the most devoted music fans may not realize stem from or at least were heavily popularized by music.

Pull out all the stops

Although this one isn’t used quite as much these days, saying that you “pulled out all the stops,” means that you did all you could to reach a goal, that you made every effort possible to get something done. If the web page you’re reading right now goes down, and everyone here on “the heat squad” calls everyone we know with any background in computers until the page is up and running again, we can say we “pulled out all the stops” to fix the page.
The wording of the phrase may sound like it has something to do with transportation, with stopping at every stop, or like it may refer to “stopping what you’re doing,” repeatedly, but neither of those things are accurate. The “stops” in “pull out all the stops” are the “stops” on an organ. When you pull out all the stops, the organ does the most it can do, as it produces the loudest sound the instrument can possibly make.

Your forte

Your “forte” is your strength, or something you are particularly good at. When “not” is added to it, as in “not my forte,” it then refers to something you are especially bad at doing. If I am good enough to make my living as a writer, I can say, “Writing is my forte.” If I am also aware that I would struggle to pass a high school math class at fifty years old, I would say “Math is not my forte,” or even “Math is very much not my forte.”

While the term actually originates from fencing, that pronunciation is actually “fort,” with a very soft “t” sound. The way we pronounce the word when we say something is “our forte” or “not our forte” as “four-tay,” comes from the Italian for “strong,” and is most commonly associated with music.
As anyone who plays and/or reads music knows, “forte” refers to playing in a very forceful, loud, or strong manner.

Bling

“Bling” is a relatively recent slang word, first widely heard in the 1990s. It of course refers to very flashy and expensive jewelry, usually diamonds and gold, though any necklace, ring, bracelet, earring, pin, or chain can be described as “bling” if it stands out as costing a lot of money. Some people use the term “bling” to describe any shiny jewelry or accessory, such as saying a pair of shoes or a dress accented with rhinestones has “some bling” or “a little bling,” but most “bling” costs or is worth a lot of money.

In the 2000’s the term took a derogatory turn, as it became associated with showing off to a criminal degree….literally. “The bling ring,” was a nickname given to a group of middle class and moderately wealthy kids living in Calabasas in 2008-2009. Although none of these kids were anywhere near poor, they were not as wealthy as most of their peers in this most exclusive neighborhood of Los Angeles. Rather than getting jobs and saving up for what they wanted, these kids decided that breaking into celebrities’ homes and stealing their designer clothes and bags, cash, and jewelry was a better way to show off for their classmates. The term may always be associated with these individuals now, but this is not where it originated. Before the widely publicized case, the word “bling,” was used in song lyrics to describe expensive jewelry.

Rapper B.G. of Cash Money Millionaires is credited with coining the phrase in 1999 in the song “Bling Bling.” The song features several lines that start with “bling bling,” including one about a “pinky ring worth about fifty.”

YOLO

This one quickly went from catchy and cute to annoying to something to be avoided. Today, “YOLO,” meaning “you only live once” is often used as an excuse for making poor choices. One of the more recent sightings of YOLO was on the YouTube channel, “Social Symone,” a platform the host, Symone, uses to call attention to and critique many of the poor financial decisions people make today.

Her May 17, 2025 video titled “You scream YOLO but you’re broke,” features a woman who refuses to save money, budget, or pay that much attention to her bills because she wants to spend in order to live her best life now, arguing that “you only live once...yolo.”
Of course, people have been saying “You only live once,” to both make excuses and encourage beneficial choices others are reluctant to make, for many years. However, expressing it verbally using the acronym YOLO comes not from excuse-makers on social media, but from music.

Canadian rapper Drake first voiced the classic phrase “you only live once” as “YOLO” on his 2011 song “The Motto.”
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Let’s see what words music will give us next.