Month: July 2025

Word of the Week! Strangelovian

Slim Pickens from Doctor StrangeloveFunny that this month I found in my mail box a special issue of The Atlantic, marking the 80th anniversary of the nuclear age. I really enjoy printed magazines, incidentally, though for this one I gobble down their online content, as well.

I’ve subscribed for the past 40 years, so I’ve been around for half the time we’ve had mushroom clouds casting their long shadows. Twenty years before I subscribed, we had one of the finest dark comedies of the 20th Century, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Doctor Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love The Bomb.

One of the pieces in the special issue focuses on the films of the nuclear era, where I encountered our word of the week. It’s commonly gets defined as “of or pertaining to nuclear apocalypse, especially through incompetence or shortsightedness.”  I cannot trace the origin of the definition, as most free online dictionaries provide exactly those same words.

Whatever the source, they prove apt.

You may recall the titular character of the film is a not-so-former Nazi scientist working for the US government. During the’ crisis Kubrick depicts, Strangelove joins US officials, and one Soviet, in “The War Room” as the superpowers hurtle toward doomsday. Comedy ensues, much of it graveyard humor. I’ll stop with the plot there, but Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Slim Pickens put in signature performances well worth your time, and nervous laughter, today.

The film’s antiwar message was made all the stronger by the absurdity of the times: with the world on the precipice of mutual assured destruction, how could anyone in power consider a nuclear war winnable? That’s the core of “Strangelovian” humor. The OED gives first recorded use in 1978, which surprised me. It also notes, that while our word has not widely employed, usage has begun to creep upward, perhaps in keeping with increased worries about nuclear proliferation.

That makes both film and word noteworthy today. May cooler and wiser heads prevail than did in the film, when we next face a real crisis.

Send words and metaphors my way 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.

Metaphor of the Month! Data Scraping

Web Scraping GraphicAs I prepare for my Fall class, “Writing With and About AI,” as well as a book proposal on AI in the writing classroom, I keep encountering neologisms like this month’s metaphor.

What do “scrapers” do? They can, according to a firm that employs them, “browse sites based on your keyword inputs or connections to your website or social media accounts. They can also skim through online reviews, product descriptions, and other categories.” That sounds benign enough, as sites like this one lie behind no pay-walls (there’s a neologism to which I’ll return in some future post).  The practice, according to the Wikipedia entry, appears to date to the 1980s, before we had The Web or household Internet.

Why scrape data to train AI? From the firm quoted in the previous paragraph, data scrapers assist in “automating outreach, [and] they can also help during the early company development and research phases. Even later on, you can use them to monitor online chatter and brand perception.” As I tell my students constantly, they need to learn how to use these AI-based tools, even if they dislike them. Getting a job will depend upon AI-fluency.

And yet as I write this, the BBC has threatened to take the AI firm Perplexity to court for unauthorized scraping of its data and “reproducing BBC content ‘verbatim’ without its permission.” This use of BBC content, though free, poses a new problem for me, a self-professed “Copy Leftist” who has long opposed copyright save for creative work.

Open-access scholarship, my own syllabi, and more in The Creative Commons are there to be scraped. The problem for me involves my and other creators’ words being used without any asking or attribution; this use violates the ethos of the Creative Commons. 20 years ago, I wrote to a Hong-Kong firm that had used our online handbook pages, verbatim, without acknowledgement. I told them I’d be contacting every e-list I knew to show that they had done this. They relented and gave our creators credit. I gave them my blessing to use our content under that one condition.

I’ve long advocated having everything save classified government information and creative work given away, free. That was one promise of the original Internet. Just cite it if you scrape it. I dislike copyright for other materials intensely.

Now I’m thinking that Web-crawlers and other bots that scrape data pose an even larger problem than copyright laws and pay walls. We may need to revise copyright laws to require attribution even for Creative-Commons work, or to watermark all AI-scraped content.

Scrape the barrel for new words and metaphors, then send them to me at 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.

Creative-Commons image courtesy of lab.howie.tw