Month: December 2022

Word of the Week! Truculent

Male DeerNot long ago I covered insolent, a label that teachers affixed to me in grade school. I was also labeled with our current word of the week. It too has Latin roots.  Maybe my label came from the many fights I got in, usually getting pummeled but always coming back for more.

The OED entry gives us barbarous, savage, fierce, and other words I love. Yes, that was grade-school me.

I have not been truculent lately, though the word came up in a fine article by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic, where the scholar of online culture and gaming logged on to Open AI’s ChatGPT and “asked for a set of diagnostic criteria for an invented psychological condition I named ‘Inherited Truculence.’ ”

The AI, by the way, has led many in academia to declare without much evidence but much truculence that the written essay is dead. Not so fast, I’ll shout, with my own pronounced truculence. I find the AI’s answers to one of my course prompts worthy of an F, as it cited no sources despite the prompt’s requirement.

More on Open AI here soon.  Have a non-truculent holiday with your family and friends and if you get truculent thinking of snow, tough. I’m truculent with those who prefer summer to winter. Bring that snow in mountains, please.

See you in January but you can still nominate a word students need to learn 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 Judy Baxter at Flickr. An image search for “truculent” turned up this stag. I once had one charge me in the Madrid Zoo, so there you go. Truculent!

Word of the Week! Umbrage

 

Old Well House

I had no idea that this word, usually employed with the verb “take,” and meaning “to show displeasure,” has cast a long and complex shadow. Shadows grow lengthy this time of year, so let’s step into them for a moment.

Several obsolete meanings shown in The OED’s entry give us a sense of how, over centuries, definitions change. The word itself stretches its long shadow back through Old French to Latin, with a first-recorded use in English from the early 1400s.

At first, our word signified a shadow cast by a tree’s foliage or an object, even by a King or other grandee. Later it came to mean a feeling of suspicion; the modern “the shadow of a doubt” and “cast doubt upon” preserve some of that earlier umbrage.

I like this very old word, but The OED provides no examples later than 1900. Currently it enjoys a “usage frequency” of 4 out of 8 in The OED editors’ estimation. I bet the frequency will drop, as this week’s word falls ever more into the umbrage of time. Time leaves us all in the shade, eventually. Let’s not take umbrage about that ineluctable fact.

Nominate a word students need to learn 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 a well-house roof and its umbrage by the author.