Work of the Week! Carol

scroogeEver since I took on the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in our school’s 6th grade Christmas play, I’ve wondered about the term “carol.” The only other instance of the word had been a proper name, usually female.

When meant as a “song,” usage can be traced as far back by the OED to the 14th Century. For a song specifically for Christmas, the oldest recorded usage there is the 16th. By the time Dickens wrote his tale, I suppose other uses of the word had become rare. Like the novelist, however, we still employ the adjective “Christmas” before the noun, a redundancy; there are no Thanksgiving carols or Valentine’s Day carols, after all. Some of us even go “caroling,” and we do not modify the gerund at all.

As to its origins, our word of the week harkens back to the Middle English karol and the Old French carole. The latter apparently signified a round dance with singing.

Incidentally, “hark,” a verb for “listen” that we tend to only use in a particular carol, itself comes from Middle English. We trot out the language of Chaucer for special occasions, or even older words such as last year’s pick, Yule.  Think about it for a moment: when have you used the word “herald,” as a noun or verb, save in reference to a newspaper’s title?

I have been reading Henry Bradley’s excellent, and once influential book The Making of English. I’ve an inexpensive Dover edition, but it can be had, for free, online. Bradley notes how enriching the influence of other languages were upon English, a process that continues today. The very act of including new terms adds nuance, Bradley insists, and “the pedantry that would bid us reject the word fittest to our purpose. . .ought to be strenuously rejected.” In that spirit, “carol” has come to possess a singular use, giving us just the right term at just the correct time. Bradley refers to this process of narrowing meanings as specialization, “whereby a word of wide meaning acquires a narrower sense.”

Something about the season of lengthening nights, then returning light, also brings out ancient words from many faiths, words perfectly suited to solemnity of long dark nights or the joy of celebrations. Some of us “deck” those halls and “trim” a tree without cutting it. I attend a Yule party every year, where we “wassail” the apple tree: drinking a toast while saying the old “Wassail! Drink hale!” from pre-Christian days.

So hearken to these antique terms this holiday.  And may they be as bright as Scrooge’s, after he had some ghostly visitors. No humbug around here, please!

We will ring in the New Year with a metaphor of the month, but until then, we’re away for the holidays. Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

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

Image from A Christmas Carol courtesy of Project Gutenberg. Read the entire text there.

Word of the Week! Amanuensis

dictaphone operatorBelieve it or not, this word came up in lunch conversation with colleagues. One of them will have lectures taped for a student, yet he worries that his notes on the board may not be clear enough to someone not physically present. “You need an amanuensis,” I said. Word-snob that I can be, it’s good to be in company that didn’t need a definition. One person even said “I want one just so I can say that I have an amanuensis.”

So what is this Latin-sounding word? The etymology shows that, technically, it means “belonging to a secretary,” or one who writes things down for someone else. I’ve thought of it in that sense. The OED notes that this person takes dictation. That’s not very common any longer, on campuses or in offices. The term is nearly as hoary, with the OED’s last recorded instance from the year 1860. Like palimpsest, another Word of the Week, our term now mostly appears in Humanities courses, where it often occurs in historical contexts.

That history shows us how social change, with women no longer willing to enter typing or dictation pools, as well as technological change, from dictating devices to AI, doomed the profession and the term. Siri might be my imperfect amanuensis, yet she’s getting better at it with each upgrade. It’s noteworthy that Apple lets us pick a gender and generic accent (US/UK/Australian) for this small precursor to artificial intelligence.

So is our word going extinct, like a stenographer’s pad or the manual typewriter? That the OED has no usage frequency bar may provide a clue.  Once voice-to-text applications become good enough, I suspect we’ll need a new word. The Latin-derived amanuensis just sounds a bit prissy for the 21st Century. “Transcriber” comes to mind. Care to nominate a different word? Or invent one? Let me know.

Though we’ll take a short holiday break, we’ll publish this blog until classes resume in January. Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

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

image of an amanuensis working a wax-cylinder Dictaphone machine courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Kluge

klugeJoe Hoyle in our Business School wanted to know more about this word, also spelled “kludge” (and pronounced “klooj”) on occasion. A kluge, involving how we connect to campus services from off campus, delayed this post. It’s one of the worst kluges in how we use technology. But more on that in a bit.

I’ve always thought of kluges as dangerous, makeshift repairs such as the one pictured. Yet there is more to it than that. The Atlantic ran a story, “The Appropriately Messy Etymology of ‘Kluge’ ” that shows how murky the term’s origins have proven. At the same time, the usage remains clear: a kluge means an ad-hoc solution, usually technological, with hardware or software. It gained currency in the era of computer science. A kluge is the opposite of an elegant solution.

The piece in The Atlantic cites other kluges in our daily lives, such as the bolted-together labyrinth of the US Federal tax code. I’d add the Interstate System, where no matter how many lanes we build, it never quite works and can grind to a halt after a single breakdown. That’s why I avoid Interstate travel at all costs, going by US Route or train.

I-95 Mixing Bowl

Yet no advanced part of our transit system merits the word “kluge” more than certain airports. Newark springs to mind, as does O’Hare. Yet Heathrow is my favorite kluge of all.

No matter how often it gets a facelift or wonderful new terminal, it remains delightfully or maddeningly (depended on your departure time) “higgledy-piggledy,” to use a British term. I’ve gone up a flight of stairs at Heathrow, down a hall, turned 180 degrees, down a flight of stairs, all to end up in sight of where I began. If that is not a kluge, I do not know what is.Heathrow Hell

Shall we then get a ruling from that most UK of authorities on vocabulary, the OED? As fate has it, another kluge–the way we establish security online: a labyrinth of passwords, VPN connections, dual-factor authentication, casting of spells and praying to dark gods, so-called “secure clients” delayed me. It took two days to consult the OED online, then publish a notice of this post to Spiderbytes, our campus e-mail list.

I finally got through the decidedly klugey process to the OED; the entry there notes that our word as slang of recent origin, for a system improvised, lashed together, in the end “forming a distressing whole.’ ” That’s I-95, Heathrow, or my password list.

The earliest example of our word comes from 1962: The word ‘kludge’ is..derived from the same root as the German Kluge.., originally meaning ‘smart’ or ‘witty’… ‘Kludge’ eventually came to mean ‘not so smart’ or ‘pretty ridiculous’.

There must be a better way for getting to content behind a paywall or password gate than our current kluge: Iris scans? Blood sample? Replacing the kluge we currently use to identify ourselves online should be on the to-do lists of every major software company.  Go ahead: invent it and you, not Elon Musk, will be teh first to land a big silver passenger rocket on Mars.

We’ll continue the blog through exams and the holiday break, so please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

top image courtesy of the Facebook group “Bikers and Riders.” Do not try that at home. Mixing Bowl I-95 kluge courtesy of Richard Layman at Flickr.