So we come to the end of another year, with our final post for 2024. My aftermath of a final semester of full-time employment, surprisingly, goes to the root-meaning of this week’s word.
The OED is cooperating tonight. It informs me that as early as the 15th century, an aftermath meant “A second crop or new growth of grass (or occasionally another plant used as feed) after the first has been mown or harvested.” As fate and weather had it, I had tilled and sown with winter Ryegrass a hillside on our farm. This will be tilled in for Spring, as green manure for sunflowers and buckwheat. So my Rye is indeed an aftermath.
But why “math”? Some early examples include “after mathe” or “after meath,” and that gets closer to the etymology in play. If you look at The OED entry on “after mowth” we have it: the crop planted after mowing. How “mowth” became “math” escapes me.
In my case, I hopped on the tractor to mow down the weedy remains of the summer crop before tilling. Now we have green shoots of Ryegrass as our aftermath.
Figuratively, the word came to mean a lot more, usually what follows an event, usually a destructive or traumatic one. Let’s hope we don’t need to use that meaning and instead can re-seed our fields. Or we can listen to the Rolling Stones’ album, as I did in the aftermath of the Disco era, when we college students rediscovered all that was raw and urgent about Rock and Roll.
May your holidays be bright ones, and 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: UK cover of the album, from Wikipedia.
Thanks to Dr. Bill Ross, in Mathematics, for nominating what looks to be our Final Word of 2024, though I may well squeeze in another before New Year’s Day. I use this one, or its common synonym, “grit,” frequently with my anxious students. Their training as Writing Consultants includes a unit on “failure as teacher.” Many of them have never encountered the idea and being young, they falter at small reverses that older folks often take in stride.
No, I’m not ordering them off my lawn and I do not think them weak. They simply lack experience. I did tell a rather shocked, hovering parent once “my philosophy is to let students stumble a bit, but to be there with a helping hand when they start to fall.” Thus a human acquires resilience. I know of no other method.
Our word is an old one, though it only acquired its modern sense in the 19th century, coming from the meaning of anything that proves “elastic” or able to rebound. The OED entry provides an 1807 first use in scientific parlance to express elasticity, with 1626 as first use for a physical recoiling from something. Though the latter is an obsolete usage, we still talk about “snapping back” after setbacks in our lives.
I’d like to know what words for this virtue appeared in ancient times, when one learned to be resilient fast, the alternative being not growing up at all. The OED’s entry cites an uncertain etymology, “Probably of multiple origins. Probably partly a borrowing from Latin,” perhaps “combined with an English element.”
How resilient is our word to linguistic change? Since 1970, frequency of use has nearly tripled. We talk about resilience, at least; that’s a start toward embodying it as well as designing our built world for resilience.
May your holidays be stress-free and your vocabularies interesting. Send me more words and metaphors for 2025 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.
I’m not saying farewell to the blog, since I plan to continue Words of the Week and Metaphors of the Month into retirement. I’m sure others will write here to share occasional program-related news and other matters I’ll be handing over, rather joyfully, when I hand over the keys to my campus office.
I want to thank two readers of this blog who appeared at my retirement event on campus. Your presence means as much to a writer as any public event or accolades.
So if I’m not going anywhere, why a word about farewells? For one, we stand at semester’s end. That seems as good a time as any for remarks about the word valedictory, if not valedictory remarks. A few students in our program graduate early, so consider this post a valediction of sorts to them. I hope to see them at Commencement in May, when they will walk across the stage with all the pomp and circumstance that a university can muster in what promises to be a difficult era for our nation generally, higher education in particular. I will be curious to hear what our Valedictorian has to say about these times. They get the honor of saying goodbye to their class.
But back to our word. Several times I have run across this week’s term in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Broken Road, the final part of his trilogy about walking from Holland to Istanbul on the eve of World War II. He’s a fine writer, one of my favorite English writers, in fact. He likes, perhaps a bit too much, our term. To be fair, he struggled writing this final work and never finished it before his death. If you want to encounter a remarkable and precocious voice, start with his A Time of Gifts.
For all of Fermor’s repetition, I found a good use of this week’s word. In the gathering dusk, he takes leave of an English woman who had emigrated after marrying a Bulgarian. Her home remains full of English mementos, and Fermor writes, as he steps off into darkness, “I could just discern the valedictory flutter of a white-sleeved arm raised as she waved goodbye.”
The author here communicates a deeper truth in his trilogy: travel of an introspective sort becomes a series of saying goodbye to places and people we encounter. Sounds obvious, but I first found the idea articulated in the work of the Dutch novelist and travel-writer, Cees Nooteboom. That author, whose translated essays about Spain, collected in a 1992 volume Roads to Santiago, also states that when traveling mindfully rather than by check-list, we learn about ourselves as much as the locations we visit.
No cruises or micromanaged tours for him, Fermor, or me. During my favored form of travel, each valediction becomes an act of self-knowing. A camper van’s flat tire in Iceland this year meant two days in Blönduós, a riverside village where we got to know nearly everyone. I did not want to leave. William Least-Heat Moon calls it “the fecundity of the unexpected” in another excellent book about travel, Blue Highways. Valedictions and sudden surprises crop up again in Dinner With Persephone, Patricia Storace’s moving account of her long-term stay in Greece, some spent not far from where Fermor lived after World War Two.
From our campsite. Not a bad place to have a flat tire.
What’s the origin of our term? Sounds Roman enough, but which Latin or Greek word spawned this long goodbye? Indeed, as Etymology Online shows us, we have Latin vale plus dicere (for “to say,” still with us in a Spanish verb I use a great deal, decir) to give us “saying goodbye,” “bid farewell,” and other expressions of parting.
So why not simply say “bye bye,” or maybe “TTYL,” in our time of staring at screens and hurrying constantly?
Nuance. We seem to lose it with every text and social-media post. Partings do not seem so final in an age of constant, if shallow, connections.
Fermor makes it plain that any parting meriting a valediction bring some pain. Travelers, like academics, are not mere tourists. Travelers dive deeply into a place to find the fecund unexpected, even the unpleasant. A few such places then get revisited as often as life and wallet permit. I suppose I’m writing this post as a valediction to Paddy Fermor as much as anything; after The Broken Road I’ve only one more work of his to read. Fortunately books, like cities, can be revisited, but doing so only requires walking to the bookshelf.
Whether you wish to kick the dust off your shoes at the end of 2024 or wave to it a fond farewell, I’ll be around for your words and metaphors. 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.
I’ve been asked by a number of readers whether this blog is about to shut down, as I retire. Short answer: I hope not!
First, I am pleasantly surprised, even mildly astonished, that so many of you read this blog weekly. Second, I plan to continue the blog as long as the University will have me. I resume part-time teaching next term as a faculty member in our School of Professional and Continuing Studies, whose faculty and students have nominated more than a few words and metaphors here over the years. My research on student use of AI and its effect on writing instruction will continue as well, and I’m certain we’ll have new terms from the burgeoning new technology.
At least for now, this post is not my swan song. It’s a curious metaphor I first encountered when a head-banging teen who loved (Living! Loving!) Led Zeppelin. Their record label was Swan Song, and even then I knew that the metaphor signified a final act. It’s been a long time since my last reading of Plato’s Phaedo, but as Wikipedia reminds us, in it Socrates “says that, although swans sing in early life, they do not do so as beautifully as before they die.” Others in Antiquity and after carried that torch (there’s another metaphor!).
It surprises me that this month’s metaphor has endured so long without interruption or corruption; it can be found on the lips of those who never read Plato. Incidentally, I saw many swans (and adorably fluffy cygnets) in Limerick Ireland this year, but none were singing and I’m happy to report that none died, at least while I was watching them.
I suppose the beauty of the bird and the poignancy of the metaphor keep it vital. We end up with a final act both tragic and lovely, one very different from the metaphor of the black swan I covered four long years ago, at the very start of the pandemic that altered our lives so profoundly. My own heart had been broken four years earlier, when my favorite musician (sorry Led Zep) David Bowie released his album Blackstar on his birthday, just two days before he died. It was a deliberate act, and press accounts rightly called this important final artistic statement a Swan Song.
That’s eight years and two very different swans. How quickly they glide by! What will the next eight bring? If I’m still here and there’s interest, I’m certain we will not run out of words or metaphors.
Throughout the holidays and into 2025 this blog will continue, so send words and metaphors, seasonal or not, 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: The Singing Swan (1655) by Reinier van Persijn, courtesy of Wikipedia.
We had our first killing frost last week, a full month later than usual in Goochland County. We did not, however, have hoarfrost.
The word “hoary” sounds ancient, and as we shall see, it became related with being ancient or, nowadays, overused and hackneyed. Go back far enough, and we have the Old English har, meaning old, venerable, or gray.
My recent post about garden hermits touched upon one aspect of hoariness: the “ornamental hermits” of wealthy landowners in Georgian England were expected to wear long white beards. The facial hair and their owners get described as “hoary” by many visitors to the garden hermitages.
We can see from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s slew of definitions that “white with age” comes up again and again with our word, though more recently, “hackneyed” or “worn out” have taken pride of place.
As for “hoarfrost”? We rarely see it in Virginia, though during a few very cold Indiana winters when I was in graduate school, it occurred from time to time. I’d get up before dawn in hunting season to see wire fences and branches festooned with long streamers of frost.
This article provides a nicely written overview and some amazing images of the phenomenon, often occurring near bodies of water, when on “cold, clear, and windless nights with low humidity, when the rapid radiant heat loss from surfaces causes water vapor–not liquid water droplets, as in fog–to form delicate, needle-like crystals on those surface.”
I adore cold weather. I could look at that writer’s images of frost all day long. Florida is for the rest of you. Bring on the hoarfrost.
I hope your holidays are warm (indoors) and seasonal (outside). The blog, full of words hoary and new, will continue all winter and into the months I don’t like so well.
Please send useful words and metaphors 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.
Here’s another word of great utility for our times. Our word describes a person who follows the teachings of Stoicism, well explained in this entry from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I encourage you to peruse this entry for a thorough examination of Stoicism’s origin, principles, and influences.
For our blog, however, let’s adapt the word to our times. “Stoic” has come to mean something different. Our subscription to The OED continues to remain dodgy, so I turned to a print source, The American Heritage Dictionary, unabridged and ponderous in my office.
I’m not satisfied by “One who is seemingly indifferent to or unaffected by joy, grief, pleasure, or pain” (you will also find that in their online entry). Why? This is but one meaning of the word, perhaps a casual one, and it does no justice to rich tradition of enduring hardships.
The dictionary definition misses the wisdom of thinkers such as Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, reducing a useful idea to a form of numbness. A Stoic temperament means something far deeper.
Let’s look at a quotation or two from each philosopher that illustrate the depth of the word.
From Aurelius, “If it is not right, do not do it, if it is not true, do not say it” and “Accept the things to which fate binds you and love the people with whom fate brings you together but do so with all your heart.”
I took these from a list atThe Daily Stoic, but in my reading of the Emperor’s Meditations, one quotation struck me forcefully, and it was said by him in many different ways. Here’s one instance: “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
We can, in short, only control ourselves and a few things that relate to us.
For Epictetus, whose philosophy I chanced upon in Monticello’s gift shop (Jefferson was an avid reader of his and a Stoic), “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will” and “Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.”
I have covered the term equanimity here before; a Stoic temperament embodies that virtue.
If a Roman Emperor realized this, with legions at his command, can we? With so much anxiety among friends, students, and colleagues, we might look back to Stoicism for a way to endure inevitable difficulties ahead.
Please send useful words and metaphors 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.
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.
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.
Strolling through the Second Floor of Boatwright Library the other day, I spotted some works on display from our Rare-Books collection. Since I have an unfathomable interest in nautical words, I turned a weather eye toward that case of treasures.
It must the the lore of sea faring that hooks me. I’m decidedly not a “water person,” my biggest adventures in a boat involves paddling a 12′ kayak in the salt marshes of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. When I see the line of breakers meaning the bay or ocean, I pivot back and head for home. So I’m an armchair swab, I suppose. Since “swab,” being the verb for mopping up a deck, can also mean “sailor,” we have our first October metaphor.
The image snapped by me comes from Jessica Spring’s book Fathoming, printed in a special 2015 edition with a set of tobacco cards (itself an old-timey collectible). The cards pictured feature three metaphors clearly from sailing or ships: “three sheets to the wind,” “loose cannon,” and “in the same boat.” I will leave it up to the reader to recall times they or someone they know embodied any of those phrases.
Yet “Rummage Sale” proved new to me. The description reads “from the French arrumage, to load a cargo ship. Damaged cargo was sold as arrumage, or rummage.” We don’t say “rummage sale” too often these days, with land lubbers’ “flea markets,” or in the UK, motorists’ “boot sales” taking their place.
Other nautical metaphors can be found all around us. Think of how frequently “anchor” works as an active verb or strategically employed noun.
Some have become bit dated, like “steamer trunk”: I suspect that few of us travel with them, today. Half a century ago, however, college students often toted one to the dorm. There it then served as a bench (if sturdy enough), a table, or an extra closet to hold extra linens, maybe a secret bottle to let said student and friends get three sheets to the wind.
When bad weather looms, I say “batten down the hatches,” though I did not know what a “batten” was until I restored some 150 year-old board-and-batten doors from a farmhouse. Battens are the nailed-down cross boards that hold the door together. If someone says “pipe down,” they are metaphorically sounding a bosun’s whistle, while you probably learned the ropes without ever climbing a ship’s rigging. And I do tell employees that for some events, we need all hands on deck.
You can amuse yourself for a long time looking over the nautical terms that NOAA describes in a blog post. You may even find some of these terms slipping into harbor in academic prose. Meanwhile, don’t fall into the doldrums before the next post. Let NOAA’s post and Captain Google tide you over. I’ll weigh anchor now, so until next time, fair winds and smooth sailing.
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.
Some time back, I picked up a copy of Thomas Jefferson: Travels, Anthony Brandt’s edited collection of Jefferson’s correspondence from 1784-1789, his years working in Paris. I find the “American Sphinx,” to use Joseph Ellis’ term, endlessly fascinating in all his complexities, obscurities, and patent hypocrisy. In some ways, his is the story of the state of Virginia, even the entire South. Partly my interest stems from Deism, a spiritual path I share with the Founding Father, partly the long shadow cast by my alma mater, The University of Virginia.
Jefferson, with his many flaws, lacked one: idleness. That brings us to our word, one he saw as the emotional outcome of doing nothing. Here, in a letter to Martha Jefferson from 1787, “guard you at all times against ennui, the most dangerous poison of life. A mind always employed is alway happy. . . .it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui is. . .” In an earlier letter from the same month, he finds the cause of such poison to be “want of industry which I had begun to fear would be the rock on which you would split.”
Ennui, as befits Jefferson’s experience, come to us from French. In its modern sense, it only dates to 1758, during Jefferson’s own lifetime. Thus, we have a ‘Modern Problem”! On the other hand, The OED dates an older sense to the 13th century, meaning “weariness.” Often the word “annoy” got employed in the same sense.
The modern loan word implies an annoyance or torpor of the soul, a lassitude. it’s that waiting-for-Godot state of mind. I’ve covered the words malaise and doldrum here before. They both can be used as near synonyms for our week’s word.
I fear we turn to dopamine-dispensers called smart phones and social media for quick bandages to slap over ennui, when instead we might find uses for our time that leave us with something tangible. If you experience ennui, get some exercise. Do some useful work. Improve your mind (and yes, you can find such content via a phone). As Jefferson advises Martha, “it is wonderful how much can be done, if we are always doing.”
Spend your time well! Send us a word or metaphor and I will feature it here. Let me know by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or by leaving a comment below. Also let us know if you would like to write a guest column.
See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.
Image Source: Ennui by Robert Seymour, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
So we come to the end of another year, with our final post for 2024. My aftermath of a final semester of full-time employment, surprisingly, goes to the root-meaning of this week’s word.
