Woah. Arcadians, huh?

Anyway, I just looked it up (I have my degree in English and I'm not happy when I don't know a word--go figure) and "trochaic" is a verse made up of "trochees". A "trochee" is "a foot (being "a group of syllables constituting a metrical unit. In English poetry it consists of stressed and unstressed syllables, while in ancient classical poetry it consists of long and short syllables.") consisting of one long or stressed syllable followed by one short of unstressed syllable".

Um...

A trochee sounds like somethin' Kevin Naquin might put in his sauce piquante.
JB

The way I usually explain this to my students is to start with the basics:

Many people think that our sense of rhythm (both for music and language) comes from hearing our mothers' heartbeats in the womb.

The heartbeat would go:
lub-DUB / lub-DUB / lub-DUB / lub-DUB / lub-DUB /

This rhythm has one unstressed beat (lub) that is followed by a stressed beat (DUB). This pattern of unstress & stress is referred to as an Iamb.

The English language--as well as many others--falls naturally into the pattern of iambs.

What a trochee does is simply reverse this pattern, so that you have a stressed beat followed by an unstressed beat:

LUB-dub / LUB-dub / LUB-dub / LUB-dub / LUB-dub /

So, in musical terms, a trochee is simply a syncopated iamb.

And one of the things that makes Cajun music distinctive is the improvisational syncopation that players often add to the music. By syncopating the beat, we get a rhythm that feels pushed forward and that has a slight jarring effect that gets people's attention.

Probably more than anyone wanted to know, but I hope it helps.

Class dismissed.
Jude