'Reluctance or Unwillingness to Be Compelled'

A productive day: two new words. The first, tangana. I was listening to Louis Armstrong’s recordings from 1929, including W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Four years earlier, Armstrong had played cornet on Bessie Smith’s version of the song. The later performance is credited to Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra. What did Philip Larkin have to say about it? In a March 1968 review collected in All What Jazz (1985), he calls it “the hottest record ever made,” and goes on:

“Starting in media res, with eight bars of the lolloping tangana release, it soon resolves into a genial up-tempo polyphony, with [J.C.] Higginbotham, [Red] Allen and Charlie Holmes observable behind the trumpet lead.”

The OED, which tells us the word’s origin is unknown, isn’t terribly helpful with its definition either: “a type of rhythm used in jazz music.” The second of three citations is more helpful and suggests Larkin may have encountered the word in Barry Ulanov’s A History of Jazz in America (1952): “In 1914 Handy published his ‘St. Louis Blues’ with its provocative Tangana rhythm, which is a kind of habanera or tango beat consisting of a dotted quarter, an eighth-note, and two quarter-notes.” Larkin’s modifier is interesting too. The OED defines lolloping as “to lounge or sprawl; to go with a lounging gait.” We already know how to loll.

The second word is renitency, which I found in the first paragraph of Book III, Chap. XXXIV of Tristram Shandy: “It is a singular blessing, that nature has form’d the mind of man with the same happy backwardness and renitency against conviction, which is observed in old dogs—‘of not learning new tricks.’”

The OED cites Sterne’s usage. It means: “resistance; reluctance or unwillingness to be compelled or persuaded; uncooperativeness.” We might say contrariness or bullheadedness. Bonus points to anyone who composes an intelligible sentence using both words.