Richmond Writing

Metaphor of the Month! Brain Rot

To be honest, this is our metaphor of the year. It was Oxford’s a year ago.

Given my research on generative AI, I should have seen this metaphor coming long ago. Henry David Thoreau, quoted by Oxford University Press, noted in 1854, “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

Today Oxford defines it as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” Thoreau’s peers with brain rot must have spent all day reading trivial books and newspapers.

Nowadays I’m seeing brain rot in my laziest and most harried/distracted students who depend upon AI to do the thinking for them. They cannot remember what they have done for earlier assignments, cannot connect parts of the coursework, and they will not check the names of sources or veracity of direct quotations in works I know well.

By the way, Oxford’s word for 2025 is a phrase, rage bait.

Evidence of brain-rot proves to be rage bait for me, though I reply in a civil manner with “this is not in our source” or “this is not the source’s claim” or “this is not the source’s name.” I give the writer an F and let them revise, but I only average the grades. There are no free lunches in the working world, and there should not be in college, either. As I tell these students “if you cannot add value to an AI’s output on the job, you will be unemployed.”

That’s my fear for them. May I be wrong, and may 2026 be less full of rage and more mentally uplifting for us all. May your brains never rot or even hurt.Mister Gumby and I will you again here in the new year.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

images: Steampunk brain, Creative-Commons image via freepix. Monty Python screen cap.

Word of the Week! Aperitif

in flight snack and drink

Reader Michael Stern, who describes himself as “a card-carrying student in the School of Professional and Continuing Studies” and a lifelong learner, nominated this week’s word. He’d seen it used in a novel way in a university announcement and asked if it might make a good word to discuss. I agree!

Our word is modern, with the first recorded borrowing from French in the 1890s. Michael’s sense of the term is correct: an aperitif is an alcoholic drink taken before dinner to stimulate appetite.

Though it’s not a traditional aperitif, a gin Martini is part of nearly every pre-dinner ritual for me. More than one drink like that makes me useless to the world, so “one and done” as we prepare food (I love to cook). Often we imbibe our drink with a small appetizer, which serves a very different purpose from an aperitif.

The appetizer takes the edge off one’s hunger, whereas the aperitif helps provoke appetite. You’ll find a list of traditional aperitifs here, including a vermouth I often use in my very traditional Martinis. Recipe follows:

1/3 Vermouth,
2/3 gin,
dash of bitters,
shaken with very small ice cubes; shaker and glasses and all ingredients cold,
Twist of lemon in warm weather, olive–never olive juice!–in winter).

According to the site noted in the last paragraph, “let the flavors of Noilly Prat Extra Dry Vermouth transport you to a world of sophistication.” This captures my sense of an aperitif; it’s for sipping sociably, not guzzling, chugging, shooting, etc. That’s juvenile drinking and a nasty habit to be left behind after college.

Back to our word: if something whets your taste for more, it can be, metaphorically, an aperitif. If it numbs that taste, it’s not.

Drink and eat responsibly this winter!

The blog will continue during exam week, with a final metaphor for 2025, then go on hiatus until the new year.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image: Appetizer and aperitif,”ANA SFO to NRT Business Class Inflight Meal” by Jun Seita, Flikr

Word of the Week! Bowdlerize

I came across our word in an essay about the life and work of Wilfred Thesiger, whose book The Marsh Arabs I’m now reading. I knew it means a corruption of another’s writing, but I’d forgotten the etymology. It’s not a word I use frequently, so I needed a refresher.

One nice thing about our word involves its straightforward etymology as a neologism, though one from the early 19th Century. Here’s the complete entry from Merriam Webster Online:

In 1807, a new edition of the works of William Shakespeare hit the scene in England. Titled The Family Shakespeare, the collection of 20 of the Bard’s plays in four volumes was at first anonymously edited, and promised in its preface to “remove every thing that could give just offence to the religious or virtuous mind.” Though the sanitized project later became a public sensation (and a source of literary derision) after its expanded, ten-volume second edition was published in 1818 and credited solely to physician Thomas Bowdler, the original expurgation was in fact the work of his older sister Henrietta Maria “Harriet” Bowdler, an accomplished editor and author. Within a year of the younger Bowdler’s death in 1825, bowdlerize had come to refer to cutting out the dirty bits of other books and texts—testimony not only to the impact of his eye for impropriety, but to those of his sister Harriet as well, though her efforts were obscured by history, if not technically bowdlerized.

How many other less famous works have been “cleaned up” by survivors or literary executors? It’s a form of posthumous censorship, generally, though I think of a pop-culture example where the creators were very much alive. When the Rolling Stones appeared on Ed Sullivan’s variety show in 1967, they had to change the lyric “let’s spend the night together” to “let’s spend some time together” and if you can stomach the stupid commercials at YouTube, you can still enjoy Mick Jagger’s eye-rolling when he sings “time.”

Bowdler lives. Damn it. There, I cursed, using the very word that proved so infamous when Clark Gable uttered it in 1939, for Gone With the Wind. At Wikipedia, you can read about the controversy. It took a revision of the Production Board’s code to permit two banned words, “hell,” and “damn” into films.

Today we’ve thankfully moved far from those times, though have we gone too far? Students drop profanities like Autumn leaves as they walk across campus and, for that matter, we have a Presidential Administration full of people who curse like drunken sailors.

I love creative cursing, but I’m trying to bowdlerize my speaking habits. It’s *&%ing hard to do! This Thanksgiving, let’s be thankful for every curse we avoided in 2025 and keep that good habit going.

Wait. I have a solution. Let’s all curse like Yosemite Sam, nemesis of Bugs Bunny. Endure the commercials again to hear what I mean. No bowdlerizing needed.

Yosemite Sam Cussing GIFfrom Yosemite Sam GIFs

Incidentally, you need not spell our word with a capital B.

Send any razza-flappin’, flip-floppin’, flig-flippin’ words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

Consarn it!

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See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image: Jagger, mid-eye-roll screen cap from YouTube.

Word of the Week! Fugue

I had a college roommate who enjoyed learning new words. One day he said “I had a vision while in a fugue state.” He meant that half-awake, half-asleep moment when you might recall a dream to be lost by the first cup of coffee.

Fugues in music I knew, and The OED gives us a definition that dates to a first use in the 16th Century, “A polyphonic composition constructed on one or more short subjects or themes, which are harmonized according to the laws of counterpoint, and introduced from time to time with various contrapuntal devices.” You know a fugue when you hear one. They are hard to forget.

What of my roommate’s sense of the word? He was a surf-punk rocker, not Bach. Then we get this definition, just by scrolling down below all that music, “A flight from one’s own identity, often involving travel to some unconsciously desired locality.” This usage dates to 1901 and comes from psychology. You’ll find more on the phenomenon here.

So my roomie was using our word incorrectly; he was aware of himself when in that transition between sleep and alertness and began to keep a dream-journal. Pro tip: If you want to record those visions from sleep, keep a notebook by the bed and scribble down details before you lose them. Artists tend to do these things. Or perhaps some dreams, like fugue states, are best forgotten?

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

image: creative-commons image from Lumen Learning.

Metaphor of the Month! Stendhal Syndrome

I would wager that unless you have read Michael Finkel’s excellent book The Art Thief, you’ve not encountered our November metaphor. Finkel tells the true story of Stéphane Bréitwieser, who amassed a collection of stolen art with an estimated value of two billion dollars. Instead of selling what he stole, the thief built what amounted to his own private gallery where he felt the works would be better appreciated than in a museum.

Bréitwieser would be so transported emotionally by certain priceless artwork that he’d be obsessed with owning it. Finkel and those experts he interviewed attribute this to Stendhal Syndrome; our Wikipedia page on the topic notes that rapid heartbeat, dizziness, hallucinations, even fainting can be symptoms. For Bréitwieser, he was so moved that he had to steal, and this of course led to his eventual arrest.

I tried to think hard about when such reactions occurred for me; perhaps seeing the Bosch paintings in the Prado for the first time in 1985. I have revisited them several times, and my reactions are still strong. I’d say the same for Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The writer Stendahl (Marie-Henri Beyle) was overcome by emotion when first visiting Florence’s Basilica of Santa Croce; others have fainted in museums or become dizzy; one person had a heart attack while viewing Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

We need a different term for what I experienced when I first saw sunset over the Wellsville Mountains in Utah; it was a euphoria that verged on mania, very different from the majestic serenity of catching that moment three times on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in 2022.

The overwrought reactions of Stendhal Syndrome seem quite different from when a work of art, a landscape, or a piece of music bring us great joy or tears. So what works of art move you so deeply that you fear you might faint?

See you in the museum. The VMFA collection is varied and, in many spots, sublime (we need a Word-of-The-Week post for that term). With a little more time on my hands since switching to part-time work, I’ve increased both my reading as well as my museum visits. After reading about Bréitwieser, I’ll never look at artwork the same way again.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image Source: Wikipedia

Word of the Week! Limbo

Monday’s Wordle at The York Times gave me our word. I thought not of the Caribbean dance but of my Catholic upbringing.

I’m a Unitarian-Universalist these days, but I fondly recall tormenting a poor priest with questions that included “who changes all those diapers?” After all, Limbo in Catholic theology is a region of the afterlife where unbaptized infants went. As Catholic schoolboys are wont to do, I asked lots of other questions: where do these babies live? (on clouds) what do they eat? (no need), then, the diaper question (no food, no need for diapers). “Why can’t they just go to Heaven?” got an answer I don’t today recall, something about Original Sin. Religious Studies class (and I) moved on.

Despite press reports several years back, The Vatican has not canceled Limbo but in fact left the concept in…well, Limbo. It remains an unresolved theological theory. You can read about Limbo’s history here, and it includes links to the latest Papal pronouncements.

As this is not a blog on theology, let’s get to the issue at hand: words that move around as if they are dancing the Limbo. I thought the dance and the afterlife shared something. They both involve dangling between two states. In the dance, one hovers between standing and falling backward. For those floating, never-hungry babies, they drift between our word and eternity.

Yet both terms have different origins! They thus are contranyms. For the theological term, our word comes from Latin limbus, edge or border (see our modern academic darling of a word, the overused “liminal”).

The term for a dance may come from limber, to be flexible, of 16th century first recorded use but unknown origin. Mystery upon mystery, today! The first recorded use of Limbo as a part of the afterlife is much older, from the 14th Century as the OED reports.

I danced the Limbo (rather well for pre-Yoga me) in my 30s at a nephew’s wedding reception. Even if you have not tried that, you have certainly felt stranded in Limbo during phone-holds, airport departure gates, or in waiting rooms.

Limbo retains healthy frequency of usage, for those reasons. Consider how common this week’s word is, then get up and shake your body, Senora. It’s what Harry Belafonte advises.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image: Screencap by me from the film Beetelejuice, which has both Limbo the place and Limbo the dance. Jump in the line!

Word of the Week! Benchmark

In my course “Writing With And About AI” my students have been discussing benchmark testing for large language models and how companies might be “cheating on the tests” by pre-loading the test questions into their AIs. That phenomenon is called “benchmark contamination.”

If proven true for major firms that provide popular models such as Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI, it portends that progress in AI “intelligence” may be greatly exaggerated by those firms as they seek customers and investment capital.

This blog is not about AI per se, but the use of “benchmark” got me thinking of my drill press and shop bench on the farm. Careful measurements matter, so where exactly did “benchmark” come from?

Not the shop bench, as I haphazardly guessed in class. Instead, the OED entry notes that for surveyors’ tools, such “a mark takes the form of a horizontal groove cut in a surface, into which the upper surface of an angle iron would once have been inserted, forming a level surface or ‘bench’ to support a levelling staff.” If you have had the pleasure of looking at the high level of detail on British Ordinance Survey Maps, you will quickly grasp how important a good benchmark proves for careful measurements. First usage recorded is 1826 from the US, during the surveying for the Ohio and Chesapeake Canal, and the etymology remains a simple compound of two common English words.

You may use our word as noun or verb without attracting the fury of grammatical purists. If you do, just tell them “benchmark that!” and wave an angle iron at them.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image: “Mapping a feature” from Wessex Archaeology, via Flickr

Word of the Week! Heteronym

Here’s a partner to contronym that I covered recently; we garnish our salads and enjoy it; if someone garnishes our wages, we don’t.

This week’s work is also first-cousin, intellectually, to synonym, homonym (here and hear), and other oddities of English that so confuse many English-Language learners. It gets weird; “here” and “hear,” our homonyms, sound the same but mean different things. Meanwhile, heteronyms are spelled the same way, have different meanings, and pronounced differently. So here we go!

John liked to row with the team but he got in a row with Mike, who said John rowed too slowly!
Mary was a became advocate for an longer lunch break at the office. She would stop people in the hall to advocate for one-hour lunches and not a moment less!
The delivery drivers took alternate routes to get to the distribution center and they liked to alternate between Ford and Nissan vans, depending on the weather.
Holding up his bow, the violinist took a bow after his performance.

You will find lists for English and Italian at Wikipedia.

There’s no simple answer to why these differences emerged. English pronunciation morphs with, and sometimes, before, spelling changes. Native speakers simply learned both speaking and spelling (one hopes) by practice. Unlike contronyms and homonyms, as well as many figures of speech, “he took the bus” (did he steal it?), and phrasal verbs, “let’s go out! Let’s go to the movies tonight and we’ll go with Rick and Fred,” simply memorizing the context does not help with heteronyms.

Listen, repeat verbally, repeat the practice.

Incidentally, I changed the spelling of “contranym” to the more typical “contronym” at my earlier post, then discovered that they are both acceptable alternate spellings. Maybe I should alternate spellings!

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Metaphor of the Month! Cognitive Offloading

So another school year begins in the age of Generative AI, with the majority of students using AI for some purpose or other, no matter what faculty or institutions say. You can read Ian Bogost’s excellent piece in The Atlantic, or have an AI summarize it for you, or look to my own survey data from the past three years. We are in a new world, educationally, yet only now are be coming to terms with some of the effects of widespread cognitive offloading to AI.

Our metaphor implies moving something to another place, the way I offload bales of straw from my pickup’s bed into our barn. Intellectually, however, cognitive offloading means letting something else perform a mental task. We have all done this: the calculator and map application on one’s phone perform jobs once done by hand and on paper.

I had tried a simple Web search to locate first use of the term. Not having any luck, I turned, naturally, to ChatGPT 5, a model I find works far better than earlier iterations. Here’s my prompt:

I’m curious to know when and where the term “cognitive offloading” was coined. If you can provide a source I can check, all the better. Thanks.

The reply was succinct and included links I checked for accuracy:

Earliest formal introduction: The term appears prominently in academic literature in a 2016 publication by Elisabeth F. Risko and colleagues. Their work explicitly defined cognitive offloading as “the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task in order to reduce cognitive demand.”

In a review or conference-style piece published around the same time, Risko noted that the term had long existed conceptually among cognitive scientists—but was rarely investigated empirically until then.

A 2016 article authored by E. F. Risko also reiterates the definition and situates cognitive offloading within a growing trend of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and distributed cognition.

I recommend public-access sources here and here for readers who want to learn more directly, instead of cognitively offloading the work to an AI.

Learning takes time; I partner with AI to learn more, but I don’t lean too heavily on its reasoning.

Similarly, I still prefer paper maps as well as memorizing directions through experience; I even try alternative routes to help me understand the road-grid. I do use apps to plan trips, but when driving I tend to leave them off until the route becomes very complex (and you will also rarely find me on the Interstates, as I despise them). But I’m a map-geek who taught topographical-map reading when I was in military school. I do, however, love letting a machine shoulder the drudgery of multiplying or dividing numbers.

When it comes to more subtle and creative tasks, however, I grow concerned.

Like the person who only travels by map-app and finds it gives bad directions, what happens when the AI we rely upon makes mistakes we do not check? And longer term, what mental abilities may atrophy from cognitive offloading, and how, frankly, can one get back home again afterward?

Those remain unanswered questions of enormous consequence.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Creative-Commons Image source: Geograph. That’s about four years worth of straw at our place, and I have loader-envy.

Word of the Week! Prescient

We’ve another loan-word from Latin this week, meaning to have foresight. That power need not be supernatural, but simply the art of seeing ahead often attributed variously to meteorologists, economists, futurists, gamblers, and soon-to-be-lost drivers who overrely on map apps.

All that said, our word can be predictive of certain outcomes. The OED notes in an 1860 usage, “The prescient sadness of a coming and a long farewell.” The person referenced here knows what lies ahead and can predict the emotions the event will stir.

The OED’s frequency chart reveals an interesting phenomenon. Usage dipped from 1880 until about 1950, then began a steady climb that shows no signs of abating. Was that the effect of, first, our inability to predict events such as the Great Depression and the World War that followed it? Then, after that conflict, our living in a time of rapidly advancing technology, where predicting the future became something of a pleasant parlor game?

Speculations about why “prescient” has enjoyed such popularity could itself become a parlor game.

Despite that fivefold uptick in usage from the 50s to the present, some seers of the future get ignored or ridiculed. I need a post about Cassandra.

Sometimes I wonder if some prescience merely means grasping the obvious. As Bob Dylan put it, sometimes “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

I’ve no predictions for the year ahead, as classes resume. Watch the weather and watch the news as much as you can stomach it. Be ready for surprises.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image: Ulysses consults Tiresias 1st century CE from the villa Albani Marble Italy Creative-Commons license by Mary Harrsch at Flickr