April 2025 – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Metric

Metric Image

Back from the fun with googly eyes, I thought of a commonly used but poorly understood term from academia and business. Lee Parker’s recently nominated word rubric made me think of its linguistic cousin.

Instead of the adjective form we associate with the Metric System, here I mean the noun.

I think of a metric as one (usually of many) measures we employ to measure something.

This may be a short post! The OED gives this definition, “A system or standard of measurement; a criterion or set of criteria stated in quantifiable terms” with a first usage of 1934. As a plural, our word can be a synonym for statistics, figures, measurements.

Our word stands in no danger of extinction. Since 2017, usage per million words of written English has more than doubled. Thus, a data-driven world.

If you have a metric for what constitutes a short blog-post, I hope I met it.

Send me any words or metaphors of use to jessid-at-richmond-edu or leave a comment below.

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

Word of the Week! Googly-Eyed

Once you start looking for them, you cannot unsee them. It began on the Amtrak on my way to Baltimore to attend the CCCC 2025 convention. In the Quiet Car there appeared a poster with a young woman looking at the Amtrak schedule on her smart phone.

Some wag had stuck little plastic googly-eyes on the poster. I laughed out loud. Nothing academic here, but the term began to interest me. Where did it come from?

In Baltimore, on a stroll toward Fell’s Point, I had two more googly-eye spottings. One appeared on the cover of a book; the other on a harbor trash-collector boat. The signboard identifying parts of the boat noted that the goggly-eyes make the boat look friendly.

I’d assumed, wrongly as usual, that our term was a corruption (or improvement, your choice) of the phrase goggle-eyed. In my cruel high school, I learned how that meant anyone with thick glasses or bulging eyes.

The OED set me to rights on this matter, noting that we have “Perhaps a variant or alteration of another lexical item.” That “perhaps” provides a coy way of saying “we really do not know.”

My money, as well as Wikipedia’s, is on Barney Google, a nearly forgotten cartoon character. He is no relation that I know of to the software giant and dates from the early 20th Century.

Barney did indeed have bulging eyes. Now I need to go to a craft store and find some stick-on googly eyes for…never you mind. I’m not the only one thinking of this idea.

On a different train coming back from Baltimore, there they were again. Someone is up to something.

Thank goodness.

If you have any clever ideas about our term’s origin, or, better still, a term or metaphor of some consequence that you’d like covered here, send them to jessid-at-richmond-edu or leave a comment below.

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

Images: Barney from Wikipedia; other googly eyes by me.

Word of the Week! Rubric

Thanks to Lee Parker in Information Services for this popular but seemingly poorly understood term. Lee notes that “Based on my usage and that of H.G. Andrade I expect ‘a scoring tool’ among the definitions. Why isn’t it?” Let’s find out!

The origin goes back to the Middle Ages; The OED entry states that directions in liturgical books, written in red, would give directions to those conducting religious services. Later definitions get us closer to Lee’s idea. By the 18th Century, a rubric could mean a custom, a set of rules, a “general prescription.” Later still, we have starting in 1959 “An explanatory or prescriptive note introducing an examination paper.” The list of definitions goes on and on, including makeup to make one’s complexion rosy and a calendar of saints.

The origin? In Classical Latin, rubrīca for red ochre. Despite that ancient lineage, usage of our word has done nothing but increase since a low point in 1930.

Merriam Webster Online provides a familiar definition that I did not see at The OED (horrors!) and one that gets close to my own sense of “a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic papers, projects, or tests.”

I admit to playing fast and loose with our word, often using it when I mean a series of steps writers need to take in order to complete an assignment, before I grade it.

So Lee, you are correct: rubrics, in popular parlance today, mean a scoring tool, though I like the idea of red-letter manuscripts, ochre for makeup, and calendars of saints.

Send me words and metaphors to jessid-at-richmond-edu or by leaving a comment below.

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

Creative-Commons image liturgical text with rubrics, courtesy of The Saint Lawrence Press.