October 2024 – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Looming

This week I had planned for “portent,” but I see that I covered that term in 2020, just before the last national election. I guess like many of you I’m concerned, looking for portents. Whatever this year’s outcome, there are storm-clouds looming on the national horizon.

As a verb, our word traces its first recorded use to the 17th Century. Its etymology remains unclear, with The OED fact-sheet noting that it might be of Germanic origin. I enjoy words like that; in fact, it suits the mysterious sense of our word quite well.

We might use “loom” today to mean to tower over, threateningly, someone or something. While that usage retains a great deal of power, the word can also mean to appear indistinctly in the distance, the way a storm cloud might an hour or so before we run for cover. Depending upon the situation, we might employ “tower over” or “threaten” as synonyms.

Here’s a curious note: usage of our word enjoyed a steady rise in use since it appeared. Usage peaked about 1930, which by mid-decade Churchill called “The Locust Years”: these years were replete with looming troubles. Postwar, frequency of “looming” declined, bottoming out about 1990 and the beginning to increase. Do journalists like the word enough to put it back into circulation? Or do events of large consequence: political dysfunction, climate change, looming trillionaires, artificial intelligence, and pandemic drive the rise?

We all have a front-row seat, like Rockwell Kent’s landlubber on the dock from the illustration.

Whatever happens in a week, I wish you all well. Right now, it seems to me that small gestures of civility and open inquiry matter more than ever. It is a melodramatic thing to say to young people, but I remind my students every semester that I see our modern university system as a shield against a New Dark Age. Perhaps the shield has gotten battered by all the slurs hurled against higher education, but it remains one of the only shields I trust.

So if you have word or metaphor that might serve well in this season of loomings, send them to me at jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu or by leaving a comment below.

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

Image: Rockwell Kent, “Loomings” from the first chapter of Melville’s Moby Dick.

Word of the Week! Dastardly

Thanks to Josh Wroniewicz, Director, Business Office at our Campus Business Services, for this nomination. In election season, we usually have major candidates calling each other names. “Dastardly” would be a fine, if rather quaint, bit of mud to sling at one’s opponent.

Younger Boomers and older Xers will recall Dick Dastardly, a mustachio-twirling villain of the silent-movie sort, who appeared in a few Saturday-morning cartoons from the late 1960s onward. He says things such as “curses! Foiled again!” before being flattened like a pancake or blown up by one of his own traps.

Today I find the cartoons cringeworthy, save for the infectious laugh of Dastardly’s dog, Muttley (think of him as The Anti-Snoopy). No, I cannot resist giving you a link to a short video of Dick’s and Muttley’s “best” moments. Despite this cornball association, the word retains a good deal of its antique power. Dick certainly fits a few obsolete meanings of our word, as given in the OED entry. He’s dull and stupid, at times, and when he hatches his hare-brained schemes, he usually acts in secret. Thus we get at a certain type of evil: done not openly but from under cover. This type of evil would not work with malevolent,” “sinister,” “diabolical,” or other terms for active, even gleeful, doers of evil.

The most common definition still in use would be “showing mean or despicable cowardice.” One OED example illustrates this nuance well, “The slanders of an avowed antagonist are seldom so mean and dastardly as those of a traitor.” The word comes from the 15th Century “dastard,” no longer used but of an interesting and possibly English origin.

That gives us a word far more inscrutable than the modern villain who takes its name.

The blog will continue all year, so send in useful words or metaphors, by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. You are invited to write a guest post as well.

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

Word of the Week! Galoot

I didn’t know this term’s origins, though I’ve long used it to mean someone large, clumsy, and unskilled. I suspect that students will encounter it in literature from the 19th Century, as well as Southern and Cowboy fiction. I’m fond of this week’s word, personally.

When we adopted a truly giant Anatolian Mountain Dog, Swede, he was never clumsy but got called a “big galoot” when he began working on our farm. An experienced livestock guardian dog, Vela, taught him the ropes. There I go with the nautical metaphors again, as noted in a recent post. In fact, a “galoot” can mean an inexperienced sailor, as the OED entry on our word notes. They cite a first recorded use from 1808.

Back to dog-as-galoot. With Vela’s passing Swede became boss-dog now on the farm, teaching a new dog how to protect livestock as these breeds do. So my galoot is no longer inexperienced. At over 150 pounds, and standing on all four feet taller than my hip, he remains large. And I still lovingly call him “the Big Galoot,” which got howls of laughter from a Scottish friend. Thus I assumed that the term might be from Scots Gaelic.

The OED lists the word’s etymology and origin as “uncertain” but corroborates my sense that one may find it in Southern US vernacular. I was surprised to see that the noun can refer to folks of any gender, as in this 1866 example: “Wake, Bessy, wake, My sweet galoot!” And thus this blog post dived down a digital and print rabbit-hole.

Perhaps Bessy in “Artemus Ward among Fenians” is a farm animal? Not so. She’s the wife of a character visited by the narrator Artemus Ward, the nom de plume for humorist Charles F. Browne. I own a disintegrating copy of the 1887 edition The Complete Works of Artemus Ward; Browne’s sketches, like so many pieces of what has come to be known as “The Humor of the Old Southwest,” skewered everyone, including Browne’s friend Abraham Lincoln. The Wikipedia entry notes that Lincoln read one of Ward’s sketches to his Cabinet before sharing The Emancipation Proclamation, perhaps to lighten the mood for an earth-shattering event. Lincoln was no galoot; he knew how to sway an audience.

Browne, a Maine native, traveled the Antebellum South, thus making him a Southern humorist, then England and Ireland. His work proved wildly popular; he even took the stage to portray Ward, Wikipedia puts it, as a Yankee rube gifted with common sense. He died young, while traveling abroad, in his 30s. One wonders if his reputation and literary work might have equaled those of his friend Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) had Browne lived longer.

Those with an interest in the humor that influenced Mark Twain need to study some of the work of Browne and his contemporaries in Humor of the Old Southwest, an anthology edited by Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham. Though out of print, cheap copies of a first and second edition abound. For a digital collection of Browne’s humor, you can find “Fenians” and other sketches at Project Gutenberg. Now back to this week’s word!

Frequency of our word rose rapidly until 1920, when a slow decline in usage, if not galoots, occurred. Things hit bottom in 1990. I’m heartened by a rebound since, with a noticeable uptake in usage this century. We clearly have no shortage of galoots about, some quite famous; it’s a gently non-sectarian, bipartisan, international jibe on anyone new, unskilled, perhaps clumsy. I enjoy how the term lacks malice, if not exasperation. We all are galoots, as some point. “Greenhorn” in Wild-West slang or “still wet behind the ears” captures some aspects of being a galoot.

I’ve wandered, like Browne’s alter-ego, all over Ireland and Scotland without finding the origin of “galoot.” Got any ideas? Please share!

Send in useful words or metaphors, by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. You are invited to write a guest post as well.

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

Image of galoot and best friend, by me. you decide which is the galoot.

Word of the Week! Apricate

Thanks to George Hiller, on the faculty of our School of Professional and Continuing Studies, for tipping me off, back when it was still summer. Professor Hiller noted six forgotten summertime words defined in a short BBC video.

Of all six, I find apricate most interesting. I’m no sun-lover or summer-lover. My year begins when the heat breaks. That said, a little time in the sun proves healthy for your body’s levels of Vitamin D. Cats must know this. My pair love to apricate. Aprication for me begins on Fall afternoons, though begrudgingly I apricate in summer, usually when doing farmwork in the morning.

From Wiktoniary, we have the definition “to bask in the sun,” but what’s the etymology of our word? The Latin apricus, or as defined in this online source, “warmed by the sun.”

We can use sun-bathing, basking, tanning, or the casual “lie out” as synonyms. I suppose others exist.

Savor a bit of apricity (the light or warmth of the sun), moderately, while you can, all fall and winter. It’s good for you mentally and physically, and most likely you won’t get a sunburn.

Send in useful words or metaphors, 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 Source: Kitty apricating, from the Wiktonary page about our word.