Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Hootenanny

I’d planned this word for Burn’s Night, the January 25th celebration of Scotland’s national Bard. Like Galoot, I figured the word to be of Scots origin, but as with Galoot, the etymology of hootenanny proves unusual. I’m now calling it an American neologism of the year 1900 or so.

My erroneous thinking can be traced to by a couple of fine nights of drinking pints and listening to music at a pub of that name in Inverness. It’s a fine venue for “trad” or modern music and the crowd is friendly. In any case, our word seems American in origin. At Etymology Online, we find either an informal gathering of folk musicians, as compared to any old jam session, or (new to me) a type of tool used by car-thieves in the early 1930s. The OED gives it a first use of 1906, in a similar sense of “thingumajig,” “doo-dad,” or “whatchamacallit.”

In any case, in Inverness I attended a hootenanny, since we had lots of locals come by to play traditional tunes. There’s a long tradition at work here; across sea in Ireland, we’d call that a céilí; in Scots’ Gaelic, it’s cèilidh. I hope you encounter one in your lifetime; travel to small places in the Celtic lands, as we like to do–no packaged tours!–and you’ll find them. They can include poetry and dance, too. The most haunting for me? An old man singing a traditional ballad a capella in the back room of a tiny pub on the island of Inishmore, a couple of years back. It brought a bunch of young toughs who were with him to respectful silence. We all raised our glasses when the singer finished to toast the gentleman, and the whisky and stout ran like a river afterwards while a band played popular tunes.

As for this side of the Atlantic, I’m too young to recall the TV show for folk performers that ran briefly in the early 60s. The network would not allow Pete Seeger to perform unless he signed what amounted to a loyalty oath to the US, a late-blooming weed from McCarthy’s witch-hunts of a decade earlier. Seeger refused, and others boycotted the show. It’s a distant prelude to the Kennedy Center fiasco currently underway.

Set aside today’s rancor and enjoy some locally sourced live music soon. It might not be a hootenanny, but you’ll be continuing an old tradition. As for our word? I was planning to place it with “shindig” in our list of endangered words. When did you last hear either?

Wrong, again, Mister Blogger. There’s a revival for our word since 2000. The frequency chart at the OED shows a steady rise in usage until 1990, then a dip and recovery. I am pleased to report that are back to peak hootenanny. Is a might wind a-blowin’ again for folk music?

If you have seen Christopher Guest’s film, you’ll get the reference. My musical tastes run more to glam, Americana, Brit Pop, Celtic (Trad or modern), and post-punk than to 1950s-60s American folk, but this film is a must-see for its humor and one big, endearing hootenanny.Send words, folk songs, 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: Wikipedia page for that long-gone TV show

Word of the Week! Charlatan

Our trivia team, “Electric Mayhem,” got stumped by this word this week, so I decided I’d cover it.

Our trivia-host stated that he wanted a term that came from the Italian word “to babble” for a type of confidence man. We wrote down this week’s word, but we figured that the origin of our word was French, so we erased it. We’d have still lost that round, and so it goes.

Like “Montebank” that I’ve covered here before, this week’s work is of Italian parentage yet it shares French roots as well. I’ll use the same image. Whereas Montebank comes from the monta in banco, “to stand on a bench” TO sell that snake-oil, “Charlatan” has a more complex etymology. From The Etymology Dictionary Online:

“one who pretends to knowledge, skill, importance, etc.,” 1610s, from French charlatan “mountebank, babbler” (16c.), from Italian ciarlatano “a quack,” from ciarlare “to prate, babble,” from ciarla “chat, prattle,” which is perhaps imitative of ducks’ quacking.

Today we have charlatans online, promising us miracles. We have others in positions of great power. We have many who blog. I hope this post, at least, might babble a bit but present you with an accurate origin on a still-popular word.

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 of “Professor Thaddeus Schmidlap, resident snake-oil salesman at the Enchanted Springs Ranch and Old West theme park” courtesy of Wikipedia, via the Library of Congress.

Word of the Week! Blizzard

Blizzard conditions rarely appear in this part of the Mid-Atlantic, but one never knows. My undergrad students, who too often live their lives from day to day (ah, youth) don’t check the weather. They may wish to cast an eye on the forecast this weekend. While we may not get an epic fall of snow, we might get wind and very low temperatures.

Some will call that a blizzard. I would not. I “enjoyed” blizzard conditions exactly once, trying to drive a car ill equipped (’77 Volare, if I recall) that belonged to other folks from Bloomington, IN to Edwardsville, IL. The Interstate was coated with snow, which for a rear-wheel drive car wasn’t too bad. The wind was so strong, however, that it moved us around and created whiteout conditions. At 20mph or so, it took is all day to reach our destination.

What is a blizzard, technically? Etymology Online, where I went for the history of the word, has it as a “strong, sustained storm of wind and cold, and dry, driving snow,” which could described what we see from Saturday into Sunday in Virginia. The term is of American origin, with its sense of snowfall dating to 1859. Older uses of the term, perhaps related to the comfy term “blaze” appeared earlier, meaning ” ‘a violent blow,’ also ‘hail of gunfire’ in American English from 1829, and blizz “violent rainstorm” is attested from 1770.”

My wood stove is blazing as I write this, though the fire brings comfort, not fear. We heat with wood on the farm and have a furnace as backup, yet I suppose I need to make some blizzard plans soon. That won’t include going to the supermarket. I suspect they are already being raided by shoppers in a blind panic.

Come what may stay warm, and go outside only to enjoy the hiss of falling snow, the silence that follows, and the joy of sliding down a hill on a sled. I plan to do all of 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.

Creative-Commons image of The Flatiron Building, NYC, courtesy of Thinking Humanity.

Word of the Week! Milquetoast

Hello, 2026 Spring Semester. I’m not teaching this term, as I edit an anthology of essays about AI’s impact upon writing classrooms, programs, and centers. It will certainly generate more words for this blog.

Meanwhile, let’s look at a term that I use a bit, but whose origin came from before my time. I didn’t know the etymology until ran across a reference in David Michaelis’ outstanding biography of Charles M. Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts. The famous cartoonist’s career briefly overlapped that of H.T. Webster’s The Timid Soul, a strip that gave the world a meek protagonist, Caspar Milquetoast. When Charlie Brown is at his Charlie-Browniest, there’s a bit of Caspar in his humiliation. You can read more about Webster’s comic series here.

For several decades, timid people were called milquetoasts, after Casper.

The character’s name comes from milk-toast, a dish we don’t see much these days. It’s a bland concoction of toasted bread soaked in milk, perhaps sweetened or seasoned mildly. More for you! Having just made some spoonbread, which I do find wonderful, that’s as bland and inoffensive as I need while I still have teeth in my skull.

We no longer frequently hear this week’s word, one that qualifies as a neologism or newly coined word, alas. “Wimp” has taken its place. The OED has two instances of it being spelled “milktoast” with the same meaning. Unusually for that dictionary, I couldn’t find a frequency-of-use chart; it’s hiding behind a tree somewhere, like Mister Milquetoast.

Pop-culture icons come and go, but sometimes they leave us a word. I covered googly eyes here some time ago; cartoon character Barney Google gave us that one. I do wonder what linguistic influences Peanuts will leave us in a few decades? I do sometime see damaged or deformed Christmas trees marked as “Charlie Browns” at reduced prices.

Please do not be a milquetoast or a Charlie Brown. Put your googly eyes to work and 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: Caspar M tries not to give offense, even to a sign on the wall.

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!