A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter J

Jouk

Dialect
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

To dodge, duck, or evade nimbly; to move quickly to avoid something.

Detailed Definition
"Jouk" describes the quick, evasive movement of someone or something avoiding a blow or unwanted contact, and its brevity and clipped vowel capture the speed of the action. In Scots poetry it appears in contexts of comic evasion, cunning escape, and the nimble manoeuvring of those who survive by wit rather than force. Burns's world is full of joukers — people who navigate authority, bad weather, and ill fortune by quick thinking and quicker movement. The word belongs to the Scots celebration of practical cleverness and the joy of getting away with it.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Jouk" means to dodge, duck, or evade; A poet might write: "He jouked the question wi' a smile — / deflection was his favourite style." characterises evasion; "She jouked between the market stalls / and vanished through the narrow walls." creates a scene of movement; "Jouk the stone, but dinnae flee the road — / even broken paths can bear a load." uses evasion to counsel partial courage; "The salmon jouks the fisher's hook — / it's lived too long tae be mistook." applies the word to natural survival; "He'd jouked life's grief for many a year — / but sorrow finds the one who'll hear." shows that evasion has its limits
Additional Notes
Jouk is one of those verbs that captures a physical action so precisely that it almost generates an image by itself — the quick sidestep, the ducked head, the nimble evasion. It appears in verse both for its literal sense (dodging a blow, a stone, a pursuer) and for its figurative extension into social and moral evasion — jouking responsibility, jouking the law. In flyting and satirical verse, the "jouk" can be both comic and damning, the signature move of the coward or the trickster. Students should note how the word's physical specificity (it implies a particular kind of quick, lateral movement) distinguishes it from more general words for avoidance, giving it considerable descriptive precision in action sequences.
Also Known As
Duck Dodge Stoop
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