academic writing – Page 12 – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Invidious

After last week’s insidious, I ran across its near homonym. With school beginning and the need to ramp up student vocabularies increasing with the pile of reading on that way, let’s sort these two words out.

Insidious and invidious both have Latin roots and negative connotations, but if the former relates of subterfuge, invidious is more candid: any action or statement likely to spur resentment, offense, or anger. As with last week’s word, our word this week has barely budged in its meaning since the 17th Century. You’ll find lots of interesting examples in the OED entry. Most commonly today, we talk about an “invidious comparison,” such as this one, from the blog for writers, The Wickeds:

“If you don’t write everyday, you can’t write a book.”

Poppycock. The disempowering message from these morons is, “You can’t write a book.”

That sort of comparison teams up something awful with something desirable. It’s sure to provoke.

I ran across our word in a book that did get written, and written well, The Men Who Lost America, about the British leaders of the Revolutionary War. Here’s the usage by author Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy.

“In the view of one Cabinet insider, the government was in an invidious position and could not afford to risk alienating the brothers by denying their terms.”

Well respected General Howe and his older brother, Admiral Howe, proposed a peace conference to the Americans, something George III vehemently opposed. But the British government decided to both make war and offer an unsatisfactory peace at the same time. The brothers’ initiative failed, miserably.

We know the rest.

As the year begins with uncertainty, be sure that we’ll press on here. Send us words and metaphors! E-mail jessid-at-richmond-dot-edu with your nominees. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

quite timely image of “the suicide of an invidious plutocrat” courtesy of Wikepedia

Word of the Week! Insidious

Is this an apt word for these times? This darned virus is so…insidious. It’s a fine, formal word for something the creeps up and does terrible things. While the OED claims that it means “full of wiles or plots” the dictionary quotes a 1900 usage for an “insidious disease.”

How can something lacking human agency (or even the stealth of an animal predator) be insidious? “Operating secretly” from the OED definition provides the key. Our current virus fits the term, because its effects vary, its symptoms may not appear at all, and its latency seems just long enough to let it spread. Moreover, COVID-19 has social beings so clearly in its sights: I’m being cynical, but our modern economy at times seems based upon restaurants, bars, beaches, and fitness centers, all great ways for the virus to spread.

Just as last week’s “peroration” gave us our modern “oration,” “insidious” breeds other terms, such as Darth Sidious from the tragically awful Star Wars prequels. I don’t recall much about the character in those poorly written films, save that he became the Emperor later. He was certainly a creeping, slowly growing menace. Thus he was clearly “insidious.” I suppose “Darth Insidious” would be too obvious, even in a rotten movie? Or redundant (here comes another pop-cult reference) such as The Evil League of Evil from the brilliant Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog?

Time to see that one again.

While you are laying your insidious plans for Fall, send us words and metaphors! E-mail jessid-at-richmond-dot-edu with your nominees. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Insidious COVID image courtesy of Pixabay.

Word of the Week! Peroration

George Souleret, whom I met during his time with University Facilities as an HVAC Engineer, nominated this week’s word. I saw it first as “perforation,” and wondered to what new uses that old term had been put.

Blame bifocals or autocorrect, but I need to thank George for teaching an old faculty member a new word that he most certainly should know. According to the OED, our word is a speech (sometimes just the end of one) or discourse in general. I often tell students that academic discourse as we know it, as well as reasoned debate in the Western tradition, began in the era of Socrates. I visited the site of the Athenian Agora in 2007, and to me it was as sacred an experience as I’ll ever have in this life.

We have some excellent perorations, such as Pericles’ famous funeral oration, given before the great plague of Athens, a story that we may wish to revisit today. That epidemic swept away Pericles and two of his sons.

On a lighter note, I love one current usage given: “A perfectly dreadful hour-long peroration by an American scholar.”

Thus I’ll spare you a dreadful peroration on peroration. In an election year, I expect we’ll have our share of perorations, some dreadful, a few delightful.

But the term does provide a formal and Latinate synonym that, in the right place, provides an option to “speech,” “presentation,” and other similar terms.

image of the Stoa of Attalos, housing the Athenian Agora Museum by me, 2007.

Word of the Week! Conurbation

Reader Joyce Garner nominated this term she’d found in The Atlantic, one of my favorite periodicals. While I could not find the reference, the term itself is as simple to use as it is recent.

The OED lists first recorded usage in 1915. London is certainly a conurbation, or aggregation of urban areas. Ditto greater New York. So is Madrid, where I lived in Tetuan, a small town swallowed whole by the metropolis. Closer to home, one thinks about parts of Tidewater, where Chesapeake runs into Norfolk, or how Richmond and the old city of Manchester south of the James merged to become the conurbation we call metropolitan Richmond.

“Sprawl” does not have the same sense; suburban areas are not the same as urban ones, save in New-Urbanist dense development. Nor would the sprawl of one city quite capture that idea of conurbation.

I used to fret that the planet would be covered by conurbation, back in the 80s when SF writer William Gibson invented “the BAMA Sprawl,” or Baltimore-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, for Neuromancer and the books that followed.

While sprawl continues today, longer-term population trends are downward, globally, and they were before COVID-19. In 100 years, whatever evil climate change brings to our coasts and daily lives, we may be coping with a new issue: lots of vacant areas in our conurbations.

Perhaps they’ll become parks or gardens, as the global populace shrinks to a size less harmful to our ecosystem.

Come what may, send us words and metaphors to feature here. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image of East Coast conurbations at night, as seen from the International Space Station, courtesy of NASA.

Word of the Week! Mountebank

I’ve been enjoying Founding Brothers, by Joseph Ellis. This scholarly work about the generation of founders from 1776 fills in the gaps and errors of Hamilton, which I enjoyed for different reasons. Ellis pulls off a difficult feat: his book manages to draw on primary sources and cover events without being at all stuffy.

He also provides some great words in use by that generation. We rarely hear the word mountebank today, though we often–all too often–encounter them. We would be more likely to call one a “fake” or a “charlatan” today. As with Strombolian from a few weeks back, I’d like to see our word this week return to regular usage. In the days of Burr and Hamilton, both given this slur, the word might lead to a duel. Today, it would simply elevate political discourse from the sewers.

Originally, as the OED notes, the word meant what we’d call a “snake-oil salesman,” a specific type of charlatan. They stood on soap-boxes or benches, hence the Italian monta in banco that proved the genesis of our English word.

Montebanks still exist today, too, even if they rarely stand atop boxes. They are instead often in the box in front of you: look at the advertisements for those “try this one simple trick” that shamelessly appear on many Web pages.

More broadly, and much more sadly, anyone claiming knowledge without having it, and using that for fame or personal fortune is a mountebank. We have many in the public eye right now, some more brazen than others. Perhaps we need a renaissance of the old metaphor of “being ridden out of town on a rail”?

Send us words and metaphors to feature here. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image of “Professor Thaddeus Schmidlap, resident snake-oil salesman at the Enchanted Springs Ranch and Old West theme park” courtesy of Wikipedia, via the Library of Congress.

Metaphor of the Month! Plato’s Cave

Having already covered Terra Incognita at the start of the pandemic, I still find that is what we face come Fall. We’ll be facing it until we have an effective vaccine for COVID-19. I have no assurance that we won’t attend school for more than a few weeks, with 18-22 year olds who are unlikely to socially distance or mask when out of our sight, and then shut down again.

So what metaphors come to mind for a likely vain effort that we attempt when facing the unknown?

In the midst of a national tragedy where a common refrain has become “I don’t know who to believe,” we see only shadows on a wall, not the thing behind us casting them. This calls to mind the famous metaphor that Plato employed in The Republic. It’s really an allegory–a story based upon an extended metaphor. Classics and The Bible are full of them.

In Plato’s case, we cannot perceive truth clearly. We are, as Plato’s mentor Socrates claimed, prisoners chained to seats who watch a shadow-puppet show cast from behind us. We cannot turn our heads to see the puppeteers nor the puppets casting the shadows. And woe betide anyone who tried to drag them out of the cave. Read more at the Wikipedia site noted, or better still, find a good translation of The Republic.

You can also view the first of the Matrix films, one of my favorite pieces of science-fiction cinema. It explores the question of the Cave well, and the dilemma of leaving it. In the end, one character would rather see the shadows and betrays his friends. That, too, proves a useful allegory for our times. So is “the red pill,” as modern metaphor. I’ll make that a future entry.

It’s my hope that with a vaccine and some sanity again in national affairs, the shadows on the cave wall may look prettier, even clearer to us.

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

Matrix image from…well, The Matrix of course.

Word of the Week! Abjure

Linda Hobgood, Director of UR’s Speech Center, ran across this term recently and nominated it. And why am I using a scene from Peter Jackson’s film? Wait for it.

It has a legal sound, to my untrained ear. But that is merely one definition given by the OED. In fact, the term generally means to renounce. In the obsolete legal sense, it meant to leave a place, rather akin to renouncing one’s citizenship in the era before passports. Most all senses of the word are historical or obsolete, yet the word has a formal sensibility that merits its continuance.

One usage does remain current, for breaking an oath. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s history of Middle Earth, I first learned the term “oathbreaker,” back when I was a teen. These poor fellows vowed to defend a kingdom against evil, and yet abjured their vows. They were cursed to become the living dead, until another king would call upon them to fulfill their oaths.

That’s rough justice. As for our word?

Let’s abjure abjuring abjure, and bring it back into our formal use.

Image of Aragorn calling upon the Oathbreakers of Middle Earth, courtesy of The Lord of the Ring Wiki.

Word of the Week! Loquacious

Some time back, I considered the history of the term laconic. Today we meet its antithesis. It’s the stuff of Twitter: running one’s mouth constantly.

I hate Twitter, incidentally. I hated it long before it became a cesspool for the worst possible ideas imaginable. But I’m loquacious in a different way: I don’t mind running on at the mouth a bit, when needed about a complex topic. Twitter, like social media generally, encourage shallow and small bits of discourse, ones disconnected from deeper meaning, often about vital and thorny subjects.

I know educators use Twitter well, but to me, there’s already a lot of talk, and not enough listening, even in our circles.

“Loquacious” has not changed its meaning much over the years. John Milton used our Latinate term just as we do today, for too much talking.

Shall I be brief about a windy subject?

One old usage, sadly labeled “poetic” and with a last recorded instance of 1888, relates to the chattering of birds.

You know, twittering birds. Tweet tweet tweet.

Word of the Week! Malaise

Feeling it, aren’t you? A sense that things have stagnated, that the future is unsure. A second wave. A troubled election. Monuments that seemed immovable pulled down, or rather like Swamp Castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, pulled down, set on fire, then tossed into lakes. Despite my personal sense that we will make progress on racial justice, there’s a gnawing…something in the humid air.

Malaise is that feeling. If you recall the 1970s, as I do, it was a popular term then, too. Though President Carter never used it in a televised speech about a national crisis of confidence, the word got associated with this event. I sure miss his empathy, right now. I miss a President who would turn down the thermostat and put on a Cardigan.

I belong to a group called Malaise Motors, a tongue-in-cheek group of enthusiasts “celebrating the mediocre cars of the 70s 80s and early 90s.” Our perverse celebration of the banal arises from a sense that a period of stagnation lay over the nation then wallowing in the wake of Vietnam, Watergate, Oil Crises, and more. The cars were merely gutless, after the Muscle-Car era. They were not uniformly awful. And today, with a modicum of skill, you can (as I do) work on them yourself. Try that on a rolling computer that we call a “car” today. I digress.

That digression aside (I have a T-Shirt with a drawing of my Buick with the words “Malaise 74” under it) let’s have a peek at our word. Off the bat, it screams “French loan word,” because English lacks those feelings of cosmic-bum-outedness (we got ennui from the French, after all). As I usually do, I ran over to the OED for counsel.

Mon Dieu! I am correct. It’s a loan word dating to only the 18th Century (perhaps no one who spoke English felt any malaise before then). We talk about loan words a great deal in my course that prepares Writing Consultants; English has an amazing talent for nicking words from other tongues. The debate rages as to whether this happens because we can only experience things for which we already have a word (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) or whether all languages share a universal grammar (Noam Chomsky’s hypothesis). I hold with the former theory, adding one caveat: once we experience a novel situation, we invent or borrow a word from folk who have experienced it.

Want to argue about that with me? Or send us a word? We need words and metaphors our way all summer, 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 courtesy of JSTOR Daily.

Word of the Week! Vouchsafe

In March, I featured noisome as our word; like today’s lexical item, it appears repeatedly in Peter Ackroyd’s mammoth work, London: The Biography. I’m almost finished with its nearly 800 pages of text. I have not been vouchsafed so many uses of “vouchsafe” since I took a class in Colonial Literature, in graduate school.

Sounds old, doesn’t it? Even on Downton Abbey, I’ve not heard it. Perhaps Dame Maggie Smith’s character would have heard it…as a child.

The etymology is common-sensical: we still “vouch” for someone. To “vouch safe” would be, more or less, to safely trust something with another.

To be honest, I was lazy about the word, which is a shame. I assumed it meant to entrust something to another person, but as a casual search in the OED reveals, that trust can come with a measure of disdain. The first definition given includes the sense of granting or bestowing; the second includes doing so with a whiff of condescension, as in this 1660 usage from the OED:

“His Lordship may be pleased..to voutchafe a meetinge..to Sir Walter Dungan.”

Oh lucky Sir Walter, to bask in the glow of His Lordship! At times like that, I’m less fond of Downton Abbey than I am of Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry.

The spelling has changed since the days of Sir Walter, but the verb can be used in a transitive sense, as in the earlier example or one the OED provides from a decade later, “to vouchsafe an eye of fond desire,” quoting poet John Milton from 1671. The one intransitive use of the term is now long obsolete.

I would vouchsafe you our DVDs of Downton Abbey, especially after the third season, when things got increasingly formulaic for me. That said, I don’t want you to think me a condescending snob trying to make you learn new words from the Crawley family.

Send your words and metaphors our way all summer, 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 of Downton Abbey blatantly stolen, as part of an anti-monarchist direct action.