academic writing – Richmond Writing

Metaphor of the Month! Mother Nature

You may be old enough to recall a Chiffon Margarine advertising campaign featuring a woman dressed like an Earth-deity and the motto “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”

I agree, though margarine never fooled me. I love cooking so bring on the butter, lard (for pie crusts), avocado oil, and olive oil. Otherwise, get out of my kitchen.

So where did the phrase Mother Nature come from? When was it first coined? The OED is wonky today, giving lots of page errors, but I detect two entries, with one giving a first recorded use of 1390. That means three years before the birth of Gutenberg, so it merits some attention. The problem with this usage, from Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale, comes from the lack of “Mother.” The teller does relate nature to a female deity, but that association goes back to a time not simply before printing but before writing itself.

The same entry gives a date of 1500 for “Dame Nature,” so we clearly see a pattern emerging. Not until 1962 does the OED replace “Dame,” perhaps from midcentury US usage as a belittling term for women, with “Mother.”

The second entry in the OED helps a great deal with our etymology, with instances of “mother nature,” without capital letters, reaching back to 1525.

As for Chiffon? The current owner of the brand discontinued US and Canadian distribution back in 2002, as Wikipedia informs me. Mother Nature had the last laugh. While I don’t think we have an actual angry goddess lashing out at puny homo sapiens who do so much harm to our ecosystems, pause a moment to pay some respect. With a real winter this year (which I love) it could seem that Mama ain’t happy with us. Or is it Papa? Old Man Winter is another metaphor worth our while (and for next year).

Meanwhile sit back, slow down, stay home if you can, enjoy the quiet ferocity of a snow-storm. It’s not nice to fool around with Old Man Winter, either.

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.

That call for content includes updates and corrections. Regular reader Michael Stern gives us some clarity on our recent word of the week, inure:

“I have been a practicing attorney for more than fifty years and I have never seen the word inure spelled ‘enure.’ If I ever did, I probably would have thought it to be a spelling error.”

Excellent feedback. I always welcome it!

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

Word of the Week! Inure

This week’s word crops up enough in academic prose that we need something on it. I do not frequently use our word, but I like it for one specific reason.

Even a casual check at free dictionary sites reveals that “inure” can carry two very different meanings: to take effect (often in business or legal usage); to become accustomed to something, usually something unpleasant.

I’m inured to the difficult process of walking on ice, for instance (hint: cleats for those winter boots). It’s not a pleasant task. That said, I love cold weather, so there’s no need for me to be inured to that. For others, bundle up and stop complaining.

As for using the word correctly, it’s a transitive verb so it needs an object. Note how the “to” can move about. I love this 1837 example from the OED, using a spelling I’ll discuss in a moment: “To enure youths to habits of industry.” We did, then, have Slackers in the early 19th Century. Call Mister Bumble and make the kid Oliver do something useful!

The OED notes a 15th-Century date of first recorded use and an etymology native to English but “by derivation.” Have a look here for more on that particular puzzle. There’s another: The OED favors the spelling “enure,” whereas other sources favor “inure.” I tend to see the second spelling more often. Pick your poison but be consistent, please. At a site called Daily Writing Tips, the author notes that “enure” tends to enjoy pride of place for legal writing. I don’t know but any attorneys or Professors of Law, please let me know.

Inure yourselves to this blog continuing all year, when I have a word you don’t like. So why not instead send me words and metaphors by leaving a comment below or by email at jessid-at-richmond-dot-edu ?

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

Image Source: Scott Perry 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)

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.

Word of the Week! Aftermath

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.

Word of the Week! Resilience

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.

Image Source: “Resilience” by Chris Campbell at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Valedictory

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.

Blunduos camp — 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.

TTYL. Can’t resist sometimes.

Image source: Caleb Oquendo at Pexels.

Metaphor of the Month! Swan Song

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.

Word of the Week! Hoary

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.

Image: LadyDragonfly at Flickr

Word of the Week! Stoic

Marcus Aurelius — Ra 61 b, Musée Saint-Raymond Toulouse

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 at The 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.

Image Source: Wikipedia.