academic writing – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Limbo

Monday’s Wordle at The York Times gave me our word. I thought not of the Caribbean dance but of my Catholic upbringing.

I’m a Unitarian-Universalist these days, but I fondly recall tormenting a poor priest with questions that included “who changes all those diapers?” After all, Limbo in Catholic theology is a region of the afterlife where unbaptized infants went. As Catholic schoolboys are wont to do, I asked lots of other questions: where do these babies live? (on clouds) what do they eat? (no need), then, the diaper question (no food, no need for diapers). “Why can’t they just go to Heaven?” got an answer I don’t today recall, something about Original Sin. Religious Studies class (and I) moved on.

Despite press reports several years back, The Vatican has not canceled Limbo but in fact left the concept in…well, Limbo. It remains an unresolved theological theory. You can read about Limbo’s history here, and it includes links to the latest Papal pronouncements.

As this is not a blog on theology, let’s get to the issue at hand: words that move around as if they are dancing the Limbo. I thought the dance and the afterlife shared something. They both involve dangling between two states. In the dance, one hovers between standing and falling backward. For those floating, never-hungry babies, they drift between our word and eternity.

Yet both terms have different origins! They thus are contranyms. For the theological term, our word comes from Latin limbus, edge or border (see our modern academic darling of a word, the overused “liminal”).

The term for a dance may come from limber, to be flexible, of 16th century first recorded use but unknown origin. Mystery upon mystery, today! The first recorded use of Limbo as a part of the afterlife is much older, from the 14th Century as the OED reports.

I danced the Limbo (rather well for pre-Yoga me) in my 30s at a nephew’s wedding reception. Even if you have not tried that, you have certainly felt stranded in Limbo during phone-holds, airport departure gates, or in waiting rooms.

Limbo retains healthy frequency of usage, for those reasons. Consider how common this week’s word is, then get up and shake your body, Senora. It’s what Harry Belafonte advises.

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: Screencap by me from the film Beetelejuice, which has both Limbo the place and Limbo the dance. Jump in the line!

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.