Month: May 2018

Word of the Week! Iconoclast

Thanks to Dr. Jack Singal of Physics for this excellent choice.

In the original religious sense, an iconoclast defaces (literally) or destroys icons. It could also apply in secular cases, for rulers whose memory and images got erased from history by decree: consider the Roman practice of Damnatio memoriae, as in this instance.According to the Wikipedia entry for this  Second-Century image, “Geta’s face has been erased, because of the damnatio memoriae ordered by his brother after the fratricide.”  One does not get erased for trifling reasons. To see the most famous candidate for this fate, visit the Virginia Museum and be sure to say hello to the Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better remembered as Caligula. His statue in Richmond is one of only a few that survived his erasure. The stories about his madness and depravity still echo down the millennia.

As for the evolution of our word, The OED Online gives a good sense of how being an iconoclast came to mean something secular, anyone who wishes to tear down established beliefs or ideals.  The American Heritage Dictionary also provides usage notes for how the word now includes this sense; that is, in fact, the reference work’s first definition.

But let’s travel back a bit in time. I had the dubious privilege of seeing the work of the original iconoclasts first-hand, during a 2005 visit to the stone cities of central Anatolia.

Note how, in my  first photo, the faces of both Byzantine figures are removed. That’s not by centuries of fading, as in the rest of the imagery. Getting closer, one can see the gouges where someone meticulously scraped away the visages. The Deutsches Historisches Museum has a fine page about the history of Christian iconoclasm, but the practice stretches back to Antiquity. What I saw in Anatolia was comparatively recent iconoclasm, dating to some point between the 5th and 9th Centuries.

More recent iconoclasm happened in the former Warsaw Pact nations and Iraq. If Richmond’s Confederate monuments ever come down, even to stand with the far less ambiguous Caligula in our museum, it’s also the same ancient urge at work. Often the images are not destroyed, as with Saddam Hussein’s statue below, but removed from places of prominence and stored or hidden. There’s a fine post about a graveyard for Soviet statues in Estonia here at “Travel Turtle.”

Increasingly, I hear those who go against accepted opinion  and tastes “just because” called iconoclasts. They are, perhaps more accurately, merely contrarian. Guilty as charged.  Now where’s the image I can deface?

You can hear more of Professor Singal’s erudition in his interview by President Crutcher, in “Astrophysics and Big Data.”

This blog will continue all summer, so nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Word of the Week! Subfusc

Once again, Dr. Ted Bunn, UR Department of Physics, nominated our word. This time he picked one that was completely new to me. As Dr. Bunn put it in an e-mail:

It can just mean gloomy, apparently, but it can also mean “the formal clothing worn for examinations and formal occasions at some universities.” In Dorothy Sayers’s novel set at Oxford, she uses it to describe clothing in dark, subdued shades, suitable for wearing under academic regalia. I always think of it on graduation day.

Only one of my American dictionaries has a brief entry, supporting Professor Bunn’s conclusion that the word is British English, not its American cousin. The OED Online provides both senses of the word given above, as an adjective or noun. The Latin roots are plain, sub + fuscus (dusky). We have a similar derivation in obfuscate and obfuscation.

As recently at 2006, the Times of London noted that “Undergraduates at Oxford University have voted by four to one to retain subfusc costume when sitting examinations.” They voted again to retain it in 2015.  There are other specificities for subfusc at Oxford. As I learned from this article about the differences between it and Cambridge, subfusc means “a kind of uniform of a black suit, white shirt and black robe, plus a black tie for men and a black ribbon for women.”
The customs surrounded academic regalia have crossed the Atlantic far better than the word itself or, for that matter, the often subfusc weather of the British Isles. While I cannot find meteorological examples of the word, it certainly works in that context.

The image of a subfusc sky with the light just returning is my own, taken at twilight in Kenmare, Ireland in 2011.  The academic regalia of Oxford comes to us courtesy of Wikipedia.

This blog will continue all summer, so nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Word of The Week! Curmudgeon

Science-Fiction and Fantasy writer Fran Wilde, who works with my students when she’s on campus, once quipped “Joe, you are a misanthrope in danger of becoming a curmudgeon.”

Fran actually had that backwards, and that says a great deal about how fine a line exists between these words and, perhaps, who they represent. The Oxford English Dictionary Online only takes the term back to the 16th Century, in the sense of being mean-spirited and mistrustful. The word’s genesis, the OED notes, is unknown.

Like some curmudgeons I have known, then, our word seems to have just shown up to spoil our days. The American Heritage Dictionary also reveals that for two centuries, attempts to find the origin of the word have failed. The term has, moreover, shifted in what it signifies. For a long time, the elusive curmudgeon often was depicted as old, mean, and miserly. Think of Ebeneezer Scrooge (a character I portrayed in our 6th Grade Christmas play). Lately the grasping miser seems to have given way to a merely grumpy old geezer, usually male. Thus my Simpsons’ example.

So short-tempered, mistrustful, grumpy? That’s me, Fran. But a hater of all mankind? Nonsense! That would be someone like Mark Twain late in his life, who wrote in an 1898 notebook entry that “The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned.” Those are the words of someone who really hates the entire species: a misanthrope.  You see it in his later work, especially after A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

I hope my fate is gentler than the hero of that novel or, for that matter, its author. Writing this has me grinning, something curmudgeons rarely do. So perhaps there is hope. Just stay off my lawn this summer!

This blog will continue through the balmy months, so nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

 

Word of the Week! Amortize

The world of business provides few enough beautiful words, but this week’s is a favorite of mine, less for its mouthfeel and more for its utility. A person shows both their age and their financial sense when they can employ “amortize” and “amortization” well.

As its roots show, the word has something to do with death. That usage, The OED Online tells us, stretches back to the late Middle Ages, with a 14th Century example from Chaucer’s “The Parson’s Tale” provided. In 1656, T. Blount’s dictionary, Glossographia, notes “Amortize, to deaden, kill, or slay.”

That’s not what my tax accountant meant when he told me that we could amortize our equipment purchases over several years, if we wanted to write off our farming expenses. I imagine myself shooting holes in the 500 gallon cistern I use to collect rainwater for irrigation.

No, this sense of retiring a debt for equipment or liquidating something gradually appears, like modern business practices themselves, only in the 19th Century. All other morbidity clinging to the word and its nominalized form, “amortization,” have long vanished from living memory.

So consider this post a memento mori for all those other senses of “amortize,” here at the end of the academic year.

This blog will continue all summer, so nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Creative-Commons image provided courtesy of Pixabay.