January 2025 – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! FOMO

I know, it’s an acronym. Yet a timely one. Do you have “fear of missing out?”

Not me. FOMO is not part of my curmudgeonly life: I almost always see hit movies and TV series years later, don’t watch TV except one hour a week max. I leave my phone silenced, without even a buzz. I don’t give out my phone number, even to my employer. If I don’t know a number in “recents” I block it. I call it my “Love of Missing Out.” LOMO!

So where did FOMO come from? Faith Hill’s article in The Atlantic Monthly (YES, monthly again) gives us her ideas on genesis of our term, “author and speaker Patrick McGinnis coined the term.” I think she needs to say more, as McGinnis explored the idea in the early 2000s and gave it a name, but naming is not always claiming.

The Wikipedia entry and the site cited by Hill note that the “phenomenon was first identified in 1996 by marketing strategist Dr. Dan Herman, who conducted research and published an article in The Journal of Brand Management.” The Wikipedia page compares FOMO to the older “keeping up with the Joneses,” a Postwar phrase.

Hill ends up praising her FOMO tendencies, while admitting:

This is no way to live, you might be thinking. FOMO tends to be described as a dark impulse, something that keeps you from being present as you worry instead about what better option could be around the corner, or scroll miserably through the online evidence of what fun everyone is having without you.

You follow her breadcrumbs to the source, which notes how the fear can be part of anxiety disorder, the most common invisible disability on our campus.

And my students wonder why I call phones “dopamine dispensers.” Dr. Essid’s prescription is an close as your thumbs: ignore celebrities, Doomscrolling, and what comes out of some politicians’ always-open mouths. Ditch binging on TikTok, box scores, and movie trailers. Take out the earbuds and take a walk outside to see real buds already appearing on certain plants.

Build something instead of consuming things. Try some LOMO. You’d find it called JOMO at a Psychology Today article. Lomo can mean “back” in Spanish, though in my experience it meant a cut of meat. So find LOMO by turning your back on FOMO!

Yes, I’m shouting into a hurricane. But I can help a few of you lose that FOMO, part of my life’s work is done. Of course, here I am, seeking eyeballs on a blog and the dopamine hit I get when you tell me that you read it.

Just don’t call me to say so. Harumph. Time to step outside.

If you think of any words or metaphors to share with the community in 2025, send them to me by postcard, telegram, smoke-signal, pony express, signal rocket, 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.

WONDERFUL image by Kevin Hodgson at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Albeit

What a pleasant surprise to learn, from The OED’s frequency chart, that one of my favorite words for formal writing has enjoyed increased usage since 1950. The term sounds impressive. Could the uptick come from legal usage? In a Stackexchange discussion of the word, one writer notes that “many people consider it archaic.”

Not me. I like archaic, even while getting generative AI to make an image for me. I also think of John Houseman in The Paper Chase, lecturing formally.

Maybe I show off when I write that the word “possesses a certain gravitas, albeit one that might alienate general readers.” Guilty as charged; an education means a hard-earned journey, and when writing for other specialists, yes, I’ll trot out my Latin and my albeits. The etymology, however, proves as rudimentary as all+be+it.

In my example above, my usage matches the first definition given by The OED, “even though.” The term can mean “in spite of,” as well. You can read other definitions here. I recommend our word for adding some variety to formal written work. One gets tired of “even thoughs,” even though that term proves easy to understand.

I close with a bit of advice for this week. Make your stylistic choices wisely, albeit boldly.

If you think of any words or metaphors to share with the community in 2025, 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 source: Google Gemini AI to prompt “Close-up image of an elderly white male law professor lecturing while holding up an index finger” (to avoid other fingers and other meanings)

Metaphor of the Month! Spinster

I had the good fortune to spend a few days in Colonial Williamsburg, where I wandered into the shop for weaving and spinning. The interpreter on duty explained, while carding and spinning wool, how automated Spinning Jennies replaced the cottage-industry spinning wheels, leading to lots of superfluous spinsters.

And thus we continue my post-retirement exploration of words associated with old folks.

Her story got my ears buzzing; I explained about this blog and wondered how the term came to be associated with older, never-married women who also may have never spun yarn. The interpreter didn’t know for certain, but she hazarded a guess that the number of unemployed spinsters in the late 18th century led to the term being used generally for women who were seen as of little use socially. That possibility would follow a long history of legal use. The OED entry notes how in English Common Law “Use of the occupational term to indicate a woman’s marital status appears to have been motivated by the fact that many unmarried women and girls were employed in spinning,”

This makes sense; a spinsters’ hours during six-day working weeks were quite long; we were told that it took 12 women working at wheels to supply a single loom. Would they have time to marry?

In the etymology of out word, one of the longest I’ve encountered so far at the OED, The writers complicate matters. They indicate that “spinster is applied in a number of legal and official documents of the late 16th and 17th centuries to women who are also described as wives and appear to be of high social rank.” Whatever the tangled skein (there’s another metaphor) of history here, when did the shift to an older woman occur?

By the early 18th Century, a word with a somewhat murky legal meaning had taken on a negative connotation, as an unmarried woman “who has remained single beyond the typical age for marriage, often stereotypically characterized as prim and fussy or as lonely, childless, and resentful.”

There the meaning has remained, for 200 years. The word appears rarely today, its frequency of use in steady decline since 1950. The term is considered offensive; rightly so, but the drift of meaning from profession to insult does fascinate.

We may never know why this shift to an insulting meaning occurred. Today, on the other hand, we occasionally hear of press secretaries or PR folks called “spinsters,” who try to put a positive spin upon otherwise bad news.

If you think of any words or metaphors to share with the community in 2025, 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 of Spinning Jenny courtesy of Wikipedia

Word of the Week! Querulous

Hello, 2025.

My first retirement-era word relates, in my brain, to old age. It means to complain in a high-pitched voice. Sounds like a great deal of the Internet, doesn’t it?

I’m not here to complain. I’d like, first, to thank all of you readers who came by for my retirement reception. It humbled me to meet so many of you. Who the heck reads blogs these days?

Some of you. So thank you. I am not fully retired, however; I will be teaching a graduate course, “Writing With and About AI” for our School of Continuing Studies. AI will undoubtedly give us many new words and metaphors, but let’s stick to the Simpsons’ character yelling at a cloud. How did the word get associated with one’s “golden years”?

Etymology Online notes connections we might guess, to words such as “quarrel” with some rather old roots, “from Old French querelos ‘quarrelsome, argumentative’ and directly from Late Latin querulosus, from Latin querulus ‘full of complaints, complaining,’ from queri ‘to complain.’ ”

My notes about the word say “NB Wharton,” meaning “nota bene the novelist Edith,” one of my favorite writers. If I recall correctly, she used the word a bit in her works but her biographer R.W.B. Lewis also described her as being rather querulous in her later years.

I suppose if one must complain, it must be stated clearly, not weakly. Perhaps that’s our link to elderly mumble-grumbling? Who is listening, at that point? I plan on none of that, thank you.

May your voices be strong, not querulous, as you make yourselves heard. Our word has, after a long decline in usage, doubled in frequency since 2010. Good or bad? We can chat about that while getting senior discounts on coffee.

If you think of any words or metaphors to share with the community in 2025, 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.