Category: academic writing

I love the “mouthfeel” of this term. It makes me want to chuckle.

A search at the OED reveals both a noun and verb form, with the verb being more frequently used. It can mean to confound, to confuse. Often I see it as an adjective, as in “The crossword puzzle completely flummoxed me today.”

I’m flummoxed by the spelling changes in our word over the centuries. The OED gives several options from past examples. Even less certain is the term’s etymology. One interesting idea involves the history of the noun, which once meant a failure on certain college campuses.

What other college terms have entered general usage? At Virginia we used to say “punt” a class for skipping it, or that a class was either a “gut” (easy) or a “bear” (hard).  “Haze,” for a noxious practice of fraternity initiation, has a broader origin, from the military.

Perhaps “flummox” provides one collegiate example that escaped campuses into general use.

Our word also calls to mind the noun “lummox,” for large and ungainly person or animal. As with our word, the etymology is uncertain but “to flummox a lummox” has real promise in a children’s book to teach some vocabulary on the sly to the wee ones.

Do any words flummox you enough to have me investigate? If so, let me know 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.

This word perplexed me when I first encountered it, during some discussion of software. I recall the statement “what are the affordances of this particular application?” I disliked the word instantly, yet now find myself using it, as I draft an article about the affordances of peer tutoring by humans, as compared to the help provided by generative AI.

For a word I find ugly, affordance sure came in handy. To get at the root of our word, even the OED will not quite do. Wikipedia, however, with its crowd-sourced wisdom and peer-editing offers just the affordance we need. According to Psychologist James L. Gibson, who coined the term, affordance involves many factors beyond “usefulness.” His definitions cited in the Wikipedia entry involve how a particular environment benefits an animal. When applied to software, which most animals do not use, we see how graphical-user interfaces offer affordances that older command-line interfaces do not.

UNIX users can come lay a beating on me any time they wish to try.

We can dive into the signified/signifier rabbit hole here, but consider how the smart-phone’s icon of an envelope connotes e-mail, whereas a phone headset connotes a voice call.  The affordances of icon-based systems seem rather obvious; we recognize something immediately, saving us time as compared to looking up that command in a book. Older readers will recall post-it notes all around their desktop monitors with arcane tricks for DOS or other command-line programs.

Coda: industrial design is also all about affordance. Look at everyday items in your home or office and note their affordances. I can heat water in a ceramic cup or my teapot. I suppose I could drink from either, yet each offers different affordances.

If you have 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.

Screen-shot by the author

Admit it: as summer wanes and the realities of more work loom ahead, many students and faculty alike feel lachrymose. We want the restful pace of summer, if not its sweltering heat, to continue forever. We get misty-eyed as the leaves turn but we are too damned busy to sit down under a tree and let them cover us, like some Peanuts character.

Oh the tears we cry. I learned the word lacrimas when in Spain. I then began to use its cousin in English, from time to time. The origin is Latin, like so many words that elevate the register of formal prose. From The Online Etymology Dictionary, we have this: from Latin lacrimosus “tearful, sorrowful, weeping,” also “causing tears, lamentable,” from lacrima, lacryma “a tear.” First usage given dates to the 1660s, from my favorite epoch, the Age of Enlightenment. Imagine a time when thinkers sought to relieve us of many tears by promising us a better future, one based on Reason and freedom from superstitions. I get lachrymose longing for such a time in our current age of unreason.

When talking about sorrow, I apply a wine-taster’s test. I tend to prefer the “mouthfeel” of lugubrious, adding to its sound its appearance in one or two favorite novels. That word connotes something dismal as well as tearful, a funeral dirge perhaps. It’s not an exact synonym. I’ll feature it as a future WOTW later.

When I was a rather sadistic and cynical undergrad, every year in late July or early August I’d invoke Jim Morrison’s lugubrious voice, in the Doors’ song “Summer’s Almost Gone.”  It provided surefire and tearful torments for my friends and roommates. The video below comes from Rhino Records, so it’s unlikely to vanish from YouTube over copyright infringement. Irony of ironies: the little commercials we endure before videos were all about productivity software! Now THAT is lachrymose.

While writing this post, Neil Young’s lachrymose classic “Old Man” followed the Doors. I seem to have a tearful playlist on YouTube.

Okay, some advice from this old man: look at your life and get back to work, slackers! As my old man might have said, “Tears won’t buy you no groceries, boy!”

Dry your eyes and send me useful words or metaphors, by e-mailing 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.

Boo-hoo-hoo emoji courtesy of Creatzilla.

Here we go, with another of my nautical words. I am no sailor or even that much of a lover of “going to the beach,” though if it’s a rugged coastline in Nova Scotia, Ireland, or northwest Spain, count me in. The deep blue or green of their oceans look unfathomable, as compared to the sandy brown waters I knew as a kid.

Our word has a long history and still has current use, though I’ve yet to have a student employ it. They should. Consider this June 2023 usage from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary online:

Tesla was truly ahead of his time, and quite a few of his ideas—notions that were unfathomable in that day and age—are still being pursued to this day.

Nikola Tesla was a genius, but if his ideas were truly unfathomable, would we have continued to pursue them? What is unfathomable cannot be measured. The origin is the fathom, a nautical unit of measurement meaning the span of two arms, or roughly six feet. Now it has been standardized to six feet.  The origin? The Old English word fæðm.  The Online Etymology Dictionary also noted the verb form, fathom, meaning to try to understand.

What at sea was unfathomable? Water beyond the 100-fathom hand-sounding line carried by ships. In deeper waters, a 300-fathom line might be dropped. From that same page I learned that burial at sea required six fathoms of water and gives us the term “to deep six” something. Full fathom five? Thy father was not properly buried at sea, Ferdinand.

I hope to introduce this lovely word to students who too often seem to employ the same 500 words again and again. Fathom and unfathomable merit closer fathoming, as well as usage in our formal writing. The Etymology Dictionary has a neat feature on its page that charts trends in usage. Fathom the noun has suffered a slow decline, whereas the verb has enjoyed a steady rise in usage.

Perhaps that rebound has happened because we live in apparently unfathomable times. We have many leagues to travel before we fathom some of our current problems. By the way, a league is another unit of nautical measurement, three nautical miles. That means 3.452 miles or 5.556 kilometers. Jules Verne’s novel would then put Nemo and crew a quarter of the way to the Moon. Even 20,000 fathoms under the sea would put them under the Earth’s crust, but the title certainly sounds evocative.

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.

Image source: Wikipedia

Now that the school year has ended, with diplomas and awards given, I suppose we could say our efforts have all come to fruition. Or should it be “their fruition”? I believe both are correct.  The word works well in formal prose and, as a Latinate term, elevates the diction of a written sentence.

And does the word have anything to do with fruit ripening? That would be my first guess.

Officially, no. Check the OED’s entry on our word and consider how we use “fruit” metaphorically, as in “the fruit of your labors.”  As the OED editors tell us, fruition gets erroneously associated with produce, but really the word implies to enjoy, coming from the possession (or accomplishment) of something.

May I push back against those sages from Oxford? If something “comes to fruition” and has been used in examples the OED cites, such as “The greenish nuts, ripened as always from the flowers of the previous year and now in their full fruition,” hasn’t the meaning of the word changed? We could say “full ripeness,” yet I remain a descriptivist about language not a prescriptivist. Language morphs over time, and no pedant can stop that process. Methinks that OED editors protest too much, when we look at etymology.

Both “fruit” and “fruition” share the same Latin root, fruī, for “to enjoy.” I enjoy ripe oranges all summer and starting in August, fresh figs from our fig trees (the only fruit I can bring to fruition, unless one counts tomatoes).

This blog never comes to fruition. It produces fruit–savory or bitter–all summer, like an indeterminate tomato vine. So send me the fruit of your ideas, 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.

2017 Tomato-Basket photo by the author