Joe Essid

Metaphor of the Month! Data Scraping

As 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

Word of the Week! Brinkmanship

With such a tense situation in Iran currently, I decided to trot out a Cold-War term. I recall how often the USSR and US nudged each other in my childhood and teen years. Matters often seemed “on the brink” of a catastrophe. The 1961 Berlin Crisis, shown above, illustrates how close matters came at times. I was barely alive then.

Being a snarky youth in the 70s and 80s, and a wee tyke when Hippies roamed the Earth, I did not recall Boomers’ air-raid drills or fallout shelters. We had a board game (still have it) called Nuclear War by Flying Buffalo Games, as well as one of the sequels, Nuclear Escalation. Hint: lots of games ended with us all being losers.

Whatever, Xer. “Whistling in the dark” will soon be a Metaphor of the Month.

Meanwhile, where did our current term come from? The OED is acting up today, despite my using the university’s account and VPN, but I see from their fact page that our word dates to a 1956 New York Times story and means advancing to the brink of war without necessarily intending to start one. Etymology Online, which never acts up for me (there being no paywall), states that our term comes from the policies of John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. Being “on the brink of war,” meanwhile, dates back to 1829.

I always liked Ike. Dulles? Used to be my favorite airport (BWI is, now). I never studied his work, beyond a book on the Suez Crisis.

Brinkmanship seems canny and wise, when used by the wise. Dulles was wise, by all accounts I have read.

Let’s hope that happens again today.

As Richmond simmers like a bowl of chili con carne, send cool (and cooling) 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.

Image: Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 1961. Via Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Picayune

Cigarette paper wrapper I love this word. I love the idea that New Orleans named a newspaper after it. There’s a Mississippi town called Picayune that I should visit, and of course I love it that Mark Twain / Sam Clemens used the word and has also been skewered with it. In this recent example in The Atlantic by Graeme Wood, he describes a new biography focusing on Clemens’ difficult personal life and financial disasters thus: “His credulity led to misadventures the details of which are so picayune that Chernow’s emphasis on them can be maddening.” No detail about Clemens’ life can be maddening to me: I immediately ordered a copy of Chernow’s giant biography, Mark Twain.

What makes something picayune? We have an answer! The OED notes a French / Occitan etymology but Southern US origin with an 1806 first recorded use, “One can’t buy anything [at New Orleans] for less than a six cent piece, called a picayune.” Over time, the term morphed from a small amount of money to a trifling amount to a worthless person. Thus it became a metaphor for things or people of no value.

We can name many such persons, some with considerable influence (I don’t care for influences nor do I wish to be one). In any case, despite the rise of many picayune people and pastimes, our word continues a gradual decline in usage.

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.

Image: though blocked by the picayune I.T. rules on campus, I managed to outsmart them and got this form cigarettecollector.net. I dislike cigs, but not cigars. They will yank my final stogie from my tobacco-stained, dead lips.

Metaphor of the Month! Burner Phone

Many pleasure-travelers are opting for a burner phone this year, a generic prepaid device that does. not contain their personal information. So are many corporate and governmental employees traveling to surveillance states like China.

But where did the idea of a phone we might burn up when done come from? The OED dates the term back to 1996 as first usage, the era of my first phone, a flip-phone called a TracPhone. The Rap lyrics are so dirty I can’t quote them here. But suffice to say, the brains at The OED found this first usage.

We already have what I would call “burner cars” (in the Upper Midwest, they are called Winter Beaters) and “burner clothes” (tragically unsustainable fast-fashion clothing). I suppose some readers may even have “burner friends.” Don’t tell me.

I have an inkling that we’ll be using the adjective “burner” in many more new metaphors in the times to come. Frequency of use for our metaphor continues to rise on a steady slope.

TracPhone is still around. I’ll get one for my next international trip. I’ll only want basic browsing, texts, voice, and the ability to take photos. I don’t use much social media with on the road.

Given reports of Americans’ social-media histories being demanded when they re-enter the US, I’m taking a “burner phone” to Canada next year. Frankly, my Constitutionally protected speech is none of TSA’s or Customs and Enforcement’s darned business, unless I advocate something illegal. And I don’t do that.

Safe travels.

Send me words and metaphors that express your freedom of speech by emailing 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.

Creative-Commons image: courtesy of Adrian Clark at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Agentic

We have this week a neologism that I encounter, suddenly, almost daily. The word is one you need to know, if the enthusiasts for certain technologies are not stretching the truth. Our word proves too new even to appear in The OED.

Soon it will. But what does it mean? In the current contexts about artificial intelligence, “agentic” means autonomous, making decisions on their own. Agentic AI does more than answer a query; it can be given parameters for complex tasks and then go about solving them in a manner it best sees fit. Human input may not be needed by such systems.

I’m thinking of travel a lot lately, and how, before I moved to Spain in 1985, I went to a travel agency with lots of general ideas. I then relied upon them to provide me with several affordable options for touring France and Spain before I arrived in Madrid, for a job interview that led to my first paying teaching gig.

Flash forward 40 years: tonight I dined at a really fine place in Richmond’s West End for sushi and sashimi. I’ve been curious about it since spotting it, so for about 20 minutes I read I used my phone to read reviews, comparing notes others left, looking at how it ranks with other similar places.

Flash forward again to the year 2030: Had I an agentic AI to help, I could have simply said “Hal, could you brief me on the strengths and shortcomings of the food at XYZ? I’m thinking of going.” No huge prompt needed. Hal would perform a number of tasks to discuss happy or unhappy reviews, prices, comparisons, even where the place sources its seafood. It could find out that Kirin Beer, my dad’s favorite, was on tap. I quaffed one in his honor today.

Agency of this sort does not, luckily, imply sentience; I’ve covered the term sentient here before. Even so, these new AI systems already have reshaped industries, if New York Times reporter Kevin Roose’s work holds true. You will need to get past the paper’s paywall to read the entire story, but Roose’s latest column focuses on the downturn in employment for recent college grads. In a podcast Roose prepared from this article, he and his cohost claim that for young college-educated workers, “if you look at the unemployment rate for college graduates right now, it is unusually high. It’s about 5.8 percent in the US. That has risen significantly, about 30 percent since 2022.”

This while overall unemployment stands at historic lows. One theory? Industries are simply automating a record number of entry-level positions. The replacement has proven acute in fields such as finance and computer science.

As agentic AI expands its scope and abilities, how many more jobs will also vanish?

These are questions we humans need to ask, we who have been agentic for longer than our primate ancestors had fire or went on two legs. We need to have a conversation, too, about how agentic we want our cybernetic companions to become. That’s not a doomsday warning, but if one loses a career and means of support, the outcome is dire.

As I tell my students, “if you want a job soon, you must add value to AI output.” Too many of them see AI as a shortcut. That’s not wise. Yet even if the students get wise about leveraging AI’s abilities, agentic AI may make statements like mine sound, and here comes a future metaphor of the month, like whistling in the dark.

AI did not write this piece, but if you or your AI have words or metaphors useful in academic writing, send them along 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.

Creative-Commons image from Flickr of a wonderful old-school travel agency in Glasgow, Scotland’s Great Western Road. I’ve been there, but the agency must be long gone.

Words of the Week! Epigraph, Epithet, and Epitaph

I’ve been away a bit, but I’m back for May term and beyond. So this blog will solider on this summer.

Here’s a moment when an AI proved smarter than I am. I had asked the latest free model of ChatGPT 4 about Max Beerbohm’s story “Enoch Soames,” whose exact title I’d forgotten but whose plot I recalled. After the AI pointed me in the correct direction, I congratulated it on its ability to provide correct advice, noting how (since the Devil plays a big role in Beerbohm’s story) that AI was not the Devil; we humans have the market cornered there. Then it said this:

“And you’re right: humans have a much longer track record when it comes to hubris, temptation, and poetic pacts gone wrong. We’re just here to assist, not to tempt. (Unless you’re looking for the perfect epigraph—in which case, all bets are off.”

Thus my words of the week. I imagine that my students run across the words I feature this week. So what are the differences? Here are a few ground rules:

Epitaph: memorial lines written on a tombstone. It needs to be personal so “rest in peace” won’t cut it. Jefferson’s notes his founding of the University of Virginia, as well as his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and Virginia statute of religious freedom. Note the lack of any mention of his Presidency. It’s a short epitaph. At the other extreme, at Westover Plantation for Garden Week, I read William Byrd II’s epitaph. Byrd made sure he crammed in a great deal about himself, as he was no paragon of modesty. I will skip a bit:

Here lyeth the Honourable William Byrd Esq. being born to one of the amplest Fortunes in this Country. . . .To all this were added a great Elegancy of Taste and Life, the well-bred Gentleman and polite Companion, the splendid Oeconomit [economist?] and prudent Father of a Family, with the constant Enemy of all exorbitant Power, and hearty Friend to the liberties of his Country.

There’s a morbidly funny story about me and another fellow arguing over the correct epitaph for a mutual friend. We split the cost for his headstone but never agreed on the words to be carved there. The conversation got heated. In the end, both epitaphs appear on the stone in Riverside Cemetery along the banks of the James River. They both work, as long as you didn’t know the deceased. If so, they prove hilariously contradictory.

We’ll let futurity puzzle out that epitaph. It’s not as good as comedian Rodney Dangerfield’s, but it makes me chuckle when I visit our friend’s gravesite.

Epithet: Most of us have one. I’d wager we all have a nickname. King Edward I was “Long Shanks” and Virginia is “The Old Dominion.”

Epigraph: First cousin to epitaph, this is the quotation placed at the start of some long documents. The Wikipedia page on the topic includes many famous examples. My favorite in that list? Gertrude Stein’s remark to Hemmingway that “you are all a lost generation.” He chose to lead off his The Sun Also Rises with this quotation.

Now how do we sort them out, without coming back to this blog post? I have no easy mnemonic to give you. So let’s try the same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.

As we drift along this summer, 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.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia. Show Rodney some respect.

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.

Metaphor of the Month! Rugged Individualism

Let’s begin with a lesson I teach students: check your sources.

Wikipedia provides a dubious first coinage for this month’s metaphor, citing President Herbert Hoover. Yet the OED goes earlier, to 1897 and this use by J.G. Rogers, “The stern and rugged individualism which finds no charm in the fellowship of kindred souls.” That said, Hoover may have popularized this term in the American mind.

Flawed origin-story and all, you can read about the history of our metaphor at Wikipedia’s page. Though the concept may inspire a great deal of libertarian philosophy, usage peaked in 1950 and has slowly fallen off since, as shown on the OED’s frequency chart.

Born of our nation’s frontier roots, the metaphor implies that the most resourceful people always provide for themselves. On a frontier, they often had to endure hardships, though the history we receive oversimplifies trading posts and other early means for European settlers to survive in a harsh landscape. Even Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, our quintessential rugged individuals, did not make their own rifles and gunpowder, no matter how many alligators and bears they wrestled or rivers they jumped across in one bound. See the decent, if uneven, film The Alamo for a re-assessment of Crockett’s life. The famous frontiersman comes across as a charismatic man trapped by his own self-made mythology.

While the term may have declined, its principles continue to inform contemporary political debates. We hear related terms such as “bootstrapping,” to pull oneself up from poverty to prosperity, despite obstacles.

It escapes me how a frontier concept, at the core of so much political discourse, works in an interconnected, urbanized nation. I suppose some of the origin of our metaphor comes from Emerson’s influential essay “Self Reliance,” which you can read here. When read carefully, Emerson does not imply that we are islands, nor his he talking about bear-hunting. Instead, he focuses on our inner lives, where solitude and self-knowledge make a person stronger but where being overly social distracts one from that goal. Think of Thoreau at Walden (yes, his mom baked pies for him).

I agree, yet nowhere in Emerson do I detect a survival-of-the-fittest mentality that underlies so much of the Rugged Individualist concept.

I farm and DIY a lot of things that urban and suburban folks cannot, yet I laugh at both this concept as well as the findings of 2016 Pew Research poll reported in the Wikipedia entry, that “57% of Americans did not believe that success in life was determined by forces outside of their control.”

One wonders how many of them have been subjected to natural disasters, layoffs not their doing, random accidents, or medical emergencies. So much lies beyond our control; As Emperor Marcus Aurelius contends in his Meditations many times, we can only control ourselves. See my entry on Stoic. May you be stoic in the face of things you cannot change.

Send bears to wrestle, as well as 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.