Autolycus says, "A song has a lyric. That's the rule; ...one song, one lyric. It has words; it doesn't have lyrics. On the other hand, a musical has lyrics, by.....whoever. A song doesn't. NALOPKT {Not A Lot Of People Know That]"
Ivor, I understand and appreciate your pedantry, but in this case I think that it's one of those instances where a word has been misused for so long that it becomes acceptable because of its common usage. According to the Merriam-Webster site (and several other dictionary sites I've looked at):
lyr·ic Pronunciation: 'lir-ik Function: noun 1 : a lyric composition; specifically : a lyric poem 2 : the words of a song -- often used in plural
...so either "lyric" or "lyrics" is a proper word for 21st-century pedants to use when referring to the words of a single song.
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About "redd up", Pittsburgh and Stevenson: Here's a blurb from The Word Detective that might explain the connection:
"Dear Word Detective: What is the origin of the phrase "redd up?" I recently asked my colleagues to help "redd up" the lounge and they acted like I was speaking a foreign language. I remember my grandmother telling me to "redd up" my room, but I can't find any information on the origin of the phrase. Can you help? -- Dunlap, via the internet.
Well, I don't wish to cast aspersions upon your colleagues, but my guess is that they knew exactly what you meant and were just pretending not to understand. My research assistant frequently pulls the same ruse on me. When I call to her, she will hide behind a tree and stand very still, pretending not to hear me. Granted, my assistant is a border collie named Brownie, but I think the operative principle is pretty much the same.
While you don't mention exactly where you grew up, if your grandmother routinely told you to "redd up" your room, there's a statistical probability that either you were living in, or your grandmother was from, Pennsylvania. "Redd up," meaning "to clear or clean up," arrived in America with immigrants from Scotland and northern England, and while Scots settled all over the eastern US, the phrase seems to be most commonly heard today, for some reason, in Pennsylvania.
The root of "redd" (which by itself means "to clear or clean") seems to be a combination of the Middle English and Scots dialectical word "redden" (meaning "to free or clear an area") with another Middle English word, "reden," meaning "to rescue or free from." The same tangle of roots gave us the word "rid," and is closely related to the word "ready." And none of this, by the way, has anything to do with the color "red."
While the columnist seems to think that the phrase is common throughout Pennsylvania, I have to say as a lifelong resident of the Philadelphia area that I have never heard it used around here. Perhaps the immigrants from Scotland didn't settle in great numbers here (going west to Pittsburgh instead), or if they did they were assimilated into the blend of cultures of this international port city and its surroundings. While there are still sections of Philly that are populated primarily of people of distinctive cultures (Italian, Chinese, Irish, etc.), I don't know of any that's made up of Scots or Scots-Americans.