academic writing – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Benchmark

In my course “Writing With And About AI” my students have been discussing benchmark testing for large language models and how companies might be “cheating on the tests” by pre-loading the test questions into their AIs. That phenomenon is called “benchmark contamination.”

If proven true for major firms that provide popular models such as Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI, it portends that progress in AI “intelligence” may be greatly exaggerated by those firms as they seek customers and investment capital.

This blog is not about AI per se, but the use of “benchmark” got me thinking of my drill press and shop bench on the farm. Careful measurements matter, so where exactly did “benchmark” come from?

Not the shop bench, as I haphazardly guessed in class. Instead, the OED entry notes that for surveyors’ tools, such “a mark takes the form of a horizontal groove cut in a surface, into which the upper surface of an angle iron would once have been inserted, forming a level surface or ‘bench’ to support a levelling staff.” If you have had the pleasure of looking at the high level of detail on British Ordinance Survey Maps, you will quickly grasp how important a good benchmark proves for careful measurements. First usage recorded is 1826 from the US, during the surveying for the Ohio and Chesapeake Canal, and the etymology remains a simple compound of two common English words.

You may use our word as noun or verb without attracting the fury of grammatical purists. If you do, just tell them “benchmark that!” and wave an angle iron at them.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Image: “Mapping a feature” from Wessex Archaeology, via Flickr

Word of the Week! Heteronym

Here’s a partner to contronym that I covered recently; we garnish our salads and enjoy it; if someone garnishes our wages, we don’t.

This week’s work is also first-cousin, intellectually, to synonym, homonym (here and hear), and other oddities of English that so confuse many English-Language learners. It gets weird; “here” and “hear,” our homonyms, sound the same but mean different things. Meanwhile, heteronyms are spelled the same way, have different meanings, and pronounced differently. So here we go!

John liked to row with the team but he got in a row with Mike, who said John rowed too slowly!
Mary was a became advocate for an longer lunch break at the office. She would stop people in the hall to advocate for one-hour lunches and not a moment less!
The delivery drivers took alternate routes to get to the distribution center and they liked to alternate between Ford and Nissan vans, depending on the weather.
Holding up his bow, the violinist took a bow after his performance.

You will find lists for English and Italian at Wikipedia.

There’s no simple answer to why these differences emerged. English pronunciation morphs with, and sometimes, before, spelling changes. Native speakers simply learned both speaking and spelling (one hopes) by practice. Unlike contronyms and homonyms, as well as many figures of speech, “he took the bus” (did he steal it?), and phrasal verbs, “let’s go out! Let’s go to the movies tonight and we’ll go with Rick and Fred,” simply memorizing the context does not help with heteronyms.

Listen, repeat verbally, repeat the practice.

Incidentally, I changed the spelling of “contranym” to the more typical “contronym” at my earlier post, then discovered that they are both acceptable alternate spellings. Maybe I should alternate spellings!

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Metaphor of the Month! Cognitive Offloading

So another school year begins in the age of Generative AI, with the majority of students using AI for some purpose or other, no matter what faculty or institutions say. You can read Ian Bogost’s excellent piece in The Atlantic, or have an AI summarize it for you, or look to my own survey data from the past three years. We are in a new world, educationally, yet only now are be coming to terms with some of the effects of widespread cognitive offloading to AI.

Our metaphor implies moving something to another place, the way I offload bales of straw from my pickup’s bed into our barn. Intellectually, however, cognitive offloading means letting something else perform a mental task. We have all done this: the calculator and map application on one’s phone perform jobs once done by hand and on paper.

I had tried a simple Web search to locate first use of the term. Not having any luck, I turned, naturally, to ChatGPT 5, a model I find works far better than earlier iterations. Here’s my prompt:

I’m curious to know when and where the term “cognitive offloading” was coined. If you can provide a source I can check, all the better. Thanks.

The reply was succinct and included links I checked for accuracy:

Earliest formal introduction: The term appears prominently in academic literature in a 2016 publication by Elisabeth F. Risko and colleagues. Their work explicitly defined cognitive offloading as “the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task in order to reduce cognitive demand.”

In a review or conference-style piece published around the same time, Risko noted that the term had long existed conceptually among cognitive scientists—but was rarely investigated empirically until then.

A 2016 article authored by E. F. Risko also reiterates the definition and situates cognitive offloading within a growing trend of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and distributed cognition.

I recommend public-access sources here and here for readers who want to learn more directly, instead of cognitively offloading the work to an AI.

Learning takes time; I partner with AI to learn more, but I don’t lean too heavily on its reasoning.

Similarly, I still prefer paper maps as well as memorizing directions through experience; I even try alternative routes to help me understand the road-grid. I do use apps to plan trips, but when driving I tend to leave them off until the route becomes very complex (and you will also rarely find me on the Interstates, as I despise them). But I’m a map-geek who taught topographical-map reading when I was in military school. I do, however, love letting a machine shoulder the drudgery of multiplying or dividing numbers.

When it comes to more subtle and creative tasks, however, I grow concerned.

Like the person who only travels by map-app and finds it gives bad directions, what happens when the AI we rely upon makes mistakes we do not check? And longer term, what mental abilities may atrophy from cognitive offloading, and how, frankly, can one get back home again afterward?

Those remain unanswered questions of enormous consequence.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Creative-Commons Image source: Geograph. That’s about four years worth of straw at our place, and I have loader-envy.

Word of the Week! Prescient

We’ve another loan-word from Latin this week, meaning to have foresight. That power need not be supernatural, but simply the art of seeing ahead often attributed variously to meteorologists, economists, futurists, gamblers, and soon-to-be-lost drivers who overrely on map apps.

All that said, our word can be predictive of certain outcomes. The OED notes in an 1860 usage, “The prescient sadness of a coming and a long farewell.” The person referenced here knows what lies ahead and can predict the emotions the event will stir.

The OED’s frequency chart reveals an interesting phenomenon. Usage dipped from 1880 until about 1950, then began a steady climb that shows no signs of abating. Was that the effect of, first, our inability to predict events such as the Great Depression and the World War that followed it? Then, after that conflict, our living in a time of rapidly advancing technology, where predicting the future became something of a pleasant parlor game?

Speculations about why “prescient” has enjoyed such popularity could itself become a parlor game.

Despite that fivefold uptick in usage from the 50s to the present, some seers of the future get ignored or ridiculed. I need a post about Cassandra.

Sometimes I wonder if some prescience merely means grasping the obvious. As Bob Dylan put it, sometimes “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

I’ve no predictions for the year ahead, as classes resume. Watch the weather and watch the news as much as you can stomach it. Be ready for surprises.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Image: Ulysses consults Tiresias 1st century CE from the villa Albani Marble Italy Creative-Commons license by Mary Harrsch at Flickr

Word of the Week! Autarchy / Autarky

Our word came to me spelled “autarky,” but then I discovered a second spelling, “autarchy.” The OED reveals a curious double-meaning, both related to our current economic moment in the United States and perhaps, around the world.

First, autarchy can mean policies that promote “economic self-sufficiency in a political unit,” but second and more darkly, “despotism.” Both ideas clearly have been tossed about by supporters and opponents of current tariffs on foreign goods. This blog is not interested in advocacy; feel free to ask my opinion of tariffs, in person. You’ve been warned.

For this blog, however, I do find that the double-meaning needs a bit of unpacking. Why would self-sufficiency and tyranny share one word? Both meanings come from the Greek αὐτάρκεια, so we have a loan word that caught on in the 1600s. Both senses of our word first appeared in print then with an example meaning “absolute sovereignty, despotism” cropping up in 1665. Earlier, in 1617, we get “The Autarchie and selfe-sufficiencie of God” but here it’s God’s self-sufficiency and not supreme power being evoked.

Autarky in its dark sense was often used in the 1930s to describe the enemies of world trade, then Imperial Japan’s drive for a “Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” and, as you’d expect, European Fascism.

In the US, the America-First platform after World War 1 and the rise of Technocracy, Inc. in the 30s both included autarchy in both senses of the word, with the latter wanting to build a continental “Technate” from the North Pole to beyond Panama as an “independent, self-sustaining geographical unit.” We heard this idea again recently and I looked up the old maps of the planned Technate. One appears at the top of this post. Make of its influence what you will.

When I studied Technocracy as part of my doctoral dissertation in the early 1990s, the idea seemed quaint, even ridiculously antique. Since then the frequency of usage for our word remained nearly steady, peaking in 2000.

Will ours be a Century of Autarchy / Autarky? We’ll find out.

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: 1930s map of the Technate, from Technocracy Inc.

Word of the Week! Contronym

I enjoy playing the New York Times‘ Wordle and Connections games daily. Recently the latter game used contronyms for one grouping of four words. I got it, eventually, then looked up the definition.

We have a simple definition this week: a word that can have two completely opposite meanings. The examples given by a quick search were cleave (to sever or to join), garnish (to add or penalize, as in “your wages are being garnished for non-payment of that fine”), oversight (to ignore or to monitor), and sanction (to prohibit or to permit). The final one has a cousin, unsanctioned, meaning unauthorized. That clears matters up considerably, but many other contronyms offer no alternatives.

English-language learners need to use context to figure out the right term. So do too many native-speakers in their first few years in college, as today’s students have rotten vocabularies from a lack of attentive and frequent reading (a future metaphor of the month will be “Brain Rot”).

I found a list that offers 75 common contronyms. Some of them seem simpler than others, but a few very confusing words appear there. Have a peek.

Some usage advice: if the context remains hazy, employ a different word. In the case of “we don’t know if this development will hold up our plan” (delay or support), I’d change it to one of those words. Incidentally, “hold up” can also mean armed robbery! Speaking of legal matters, in business and criminal-justice writing in particular, a secondary audience can be found in the courtroom. Use the right word or ask your attorney. In short: find one who does fine work to avoid paying a fine.

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.

Creative-Commons image courtesy of Pixabay.

Word of the Week! Strangelovian

Funny 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.

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.

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.