academic writing – Page 15 – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Moot

I find it odd that I’ve not covered “moot” before. Perhaps my interest skews toward the Latinate. This short term just drips with the mists of the Celtic fringe of Northern Europe.

So, it’s not a moot point: where did it come from? Northern Europe, yes, but not Celtic languages. Origins of the word go to Germany and Scandinavia, all with a sense of a meeting. Remember “Ent Moot” in Tolkien’s The Two Towers? Yet that is a real meeting. Noting “mock” about it.

So how did our word take on its modern sense of a “moot court”?

Moot can also mean a tree-stump , something our Oxford Don would have certainly considered in choosing his term for a meeting of talking, walking trees. Some noun usages mean merely “an argument” rather than the place where it occurs. Only when we get to moot as an adjective, meaning “having no practical significance or relevance; abstract, academic” or “unable to be resolved,” do we get our familiar meaning. Points in court were declared “moot,” and I have idea how the very word for the gathering became the word for a non-desirable outcome.

Bryan Garner’s excellent A Dictionary of Modern American Usage holds that “this shift in meaning occurred about 1900” (436). He says not why.

The reasons for that shift are not moot points. It would be worth more research to discover why.

Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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.

Belgrade Moot Court, courtesy of Wikipedia.

References:

Garner, Bryan A. A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

Word of the Week! Pandemic

Here I sit, barely able to stay upright, mending slowly from perhaps the worst sinus infection I’ve ever had. This malaise got to me thinking about how we classify disease outbreaks. The COVID-19 virus would be considered an epidemic, or a disease “prevalent among a people or a community at a special time, and produced by some special causes not generally present in the affected locality.” If you are in Wuhan, it’s much worse, but I was amazed to see several people in my doctor’s office wearing surgical masks. My pharmacy displayed a sign reading “SOLD OUT of face masks.”

Folks are clearly afraid that the Chinese outbreak could jump borders and become a global pandemic, or an “epidemic over a very large area; affecting a large proportion of a population,” much like the Spanish Flu of 1918-19. The CDC estimate of US deaths for that pandemic runs to 675,000. I’ve heard figures as high as 50 million for the global death toll. A third of the world’s population fell ill.

Both terms have earliest recorded usages in the 17th Century. Since then, modern hygiene and advances in medicine have helped to make pandemics rare, if still terrifying, events.

The CDC provides a very useful chart that differentiates seasonal influenza, an annual event, from pandemic flu, which happened three times in the past century.

Pandemics lead to irrational behaviors that can worsen an already critical situation. I hope you are washing your hands a lot. That’s much more effective than wearing a mask.

Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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 soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas, during the Spanish Flu Pandemic, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Pettifogger

Business-School Professor and wordsmith Joe Hoyle asked about this term, a timely one since it got bandied about during the Senate’s recent impeachment trial. It dates back to the 16th Century and has a nice origin, compounding “petty” with the word “fogger,” a forgotten term that may refer to “the surname of a family of wealthy mercantile bankers and venture capitalists from Augsburg, Germany.”

A “fogger,” according to that same entry, came to mean a “a low-ranking lawyer who abuses the law” but that usage petered out in the 19th Century. The term has a more modern synonym, shyster, that is with us still, in deed and word.

For our word it seems redundant to add “petty,” for small, but it accomplishes two things. First, as my students learn in the bestselling writing text, They Say / I Say: Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, it’s acceptable practice, as the authors put it, to repeat oneself “with a difference.” Adding “petty” emphasizes how petty that fogger really can be.

Less seriously, the compounding gives us the ability to engage in some wonderfully Southern-sounding alliterative curses, such as “You, sir, are no more than a pusillanimous and picayune pettifogger plundering the public purse!”

How did I do? The word “pettifogger” had legs enough to breed what are called “back formations” in our language: the verb “pettifog” and gerund “pettifogging.” I guess dubious legal practices for small coin never go out of style.

Perchance pettifoggery promotes puerile punditry? Okay, I’ll stop. At least until next week.

Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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.

Sleazy lawyer image, “Reptilian” courtesy of Jeremy Sternberg.

Metaphor of the Month! Spartan

Leonidas meets Marie

Let’s continue the Peloponnesian fun with another word from Ancient Greece, in fact, from Laconia that gave us last week’s “laconic.”

Sparta was, of course, one of the most powerful Greek city-states. Yet why did a friend describe a minimalist’s house as “Spartan”? How did the virtues espoused by Marie Kondo align with those of King Leonidas?

It’s clearly a metaphor associated with “not having a lot of stuff / bare bones / austere / reduced to essentials.” A look at the culture of ancient Sparta yields a lot of good information on Spartan values: hierarchy, simplicity, a militant orderliness for all things. The OED dates this sense of the adjective to the 19th Century, for frugality or brevity (as in a laconic reply).

Since this is still Sparta at our blog, or at least a pretense of it, I’ll end there.

Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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.

Marie meets Leonidas, courtesy of Photoshop.

Word of the Week! Laconic

I would like to be more laconic in my replies. It’s a gift. The art of the terse, but meaningful, statement can be lost on academics. We professors write, as one student in my class today put it, by “spewing ideas.”

Can a critical idea be expressed in a few words? I think so. That’s the art of a laconic statement.

The term’s origin is Greek, referring to Laconia, the region where the ancient city of Sparta can be found. The term “spartan” has come to mean minimalist. Think of a laconic statement that way.

I’ve read several about historical instances of a laconic reply, but none work better than what the Spartans said to Philip of Macedonia, father of Alexander The Great. During his campaign to unite Greece, he warned Sparta that “You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.”

The official reply of the Spartan government? “If.”

Millennia later, General McAuliffe of the US 101st Airborne, surrounded by the German Army at Bastogne, replied “Nuts!” to the demand that he surrender. Truly a Spartan, in spirit.

We can find laconic statements far from the battlefield. Here I’m thinking of how we understate a real problem, even a disaster, by calling it an “issue.” A relative of few words once quipped about a tightwad’s unwillingness, “that would require spending money.”

Succinct, understated, direct: do you ever express yourself that way?

Can academics?

Maybe.

Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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 ancient Sparta courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Philology

No, I’ve not misspelled “philosophy.” That word’s lesser-employed cousin means, at its Greek roots, a lover of words. If you are reading this, you must at least have a crush on words.

As with last year’s post, for the day commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King, I wanted a word that would describe him. In addition to his other gifts and accomplishments, King’s writing demonstrate his love of words and metaphor. He was certainly a non-academic philologist. So when did philology, as a word, originate? Why has its usage tapered off today?

The OED gives us Chaucer’s example from the 14th Century, then more early 16th Century examples for earliest uses; as with so many other words at this blog, blame Gutenberg for that. I suspect that the study of language, and the sharing of ideas about it, spread with the spread of printing.

Usage ranks a surprising four of eight on the OED’s scale. That means our word is not common but also not unguessable for English speakers. It ranks alongside one of my favorite words, schismatic, yet I imagine that more academic ears would recognize our term than the one just given. Outside of Academia, both would sound alien.

Even within my circle of scholarship–writing centers and writing classrooms–no one has ever called a colleague a “philologist.” Why then has this term fallen from favor in learned circles? Most faculty I know have a curiosity about language, whatever academic discipline they practice. One supposition I see, in a casual Google search, involves snobbishness and worse, bigotry, an early generation of scholars who served as gatekeepers for “proper” written English. Those same grandees might be horrified by the OED’s inclusion of another of my favored words, “badass.”

To learn more about the modern debate about the history of philology and what constitutes philology today, read James Turner’s book from Princeton University Press (I plan to) and Mark Liberman’s post about how it fell from grace as a formal academic pursuit. Liberman posits a new definition that I both like but find limited, “the discipline of making sense of texts.”

Can we broaden that to spoken language? More than ever, we could use an inclusive form of philology to get students and those outside our campuses to be curious about, even come to love, the play of words. Poetry slams are a start. Studying speeches by King and other gifted writers would be another branch of modern philology.

I’d welcome any other speculations about the waning of philology, as word or practice, in comments. While you speculate, please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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 ancient books of Wales courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Amanuensis

Believe it or not, this word came up in lunch conversation with colleagues. One of them will have lectures taped for a student, yet he worries that his notes on the board may not be clear enough to someone not physically present. “You need an amanuensis,” I said. Word-snob that I can be, it’s good to be in company that didn’t need a definition. One person even said “I want one just so I can say that I have an amanuensis.”

So what is this Latin-sounding word? The etymology shows that, technically, it means “belonging to a secretary,” or one who writes things down for someone else. I’ve thought of it in that sense. The OED notes that this person takes dictation. That’s not very common any longer, on campuses or in offices. The term is nearly as hoary, with the OED’s last recorded instance from the year 1860. Like palimpsest, another Word of the Week, our term now mostly appears in Humanities courses, where it often occurs in historical contexts.

That history shows us how social change, with women no longer willing to enter typing or dictation pools, as well as technological change, from dictating devices to AI, doomed the profession and the term. Siri might be my imperfect amanuensis, yet she’s getting better at it with each upgrade. It’s noteworthy that Apple lets us pick a gender and generic accent (US/UK/Australian) for this small precursor to artificial intelligence.

So is our word going extinct, like a stenographer’s pad or the manual typewriter? That the OED has no usage frequency bar may provide a clue. Once voice-to-text applications become good enough, I suspect we’ll need a new word. The Latin-derived amanuensis just sounds a bit prissy for the 21st Century. “Transcriber” comes to mind. Care to nominate a different word? Or invent one? Let me know.

Though we’ll take a short holiday break, we’ll publish this blog until classes resume in January. Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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 an amanuensis working a wax-cylinder Dictaphone machine courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Kluge

Joe Hoyle in our Business School wanted to know more about this word, also spelled “kludge” (and pronounced “klooj”) on occasion. A kluge, involving how we connect to campus services from off campus, delayed this post. It’s one of the worst kluges in how we use technology. But more on that in a bit.

I’ve always thought of kluges as dangerous, makeshift repairs such as the one pictured. Yet there is more to it than that. The Atlantic ran a story, “The Appropriately Messy Etymology of ‘Kluge’ ” that shows how murky the term’s origins have proven. At the same time, the usage remains clear: a kluge means an ad-hoc solution, usually technological, with hardware or software. It gained currency in the era of computer science. A kluge is the opposite of an elegant solution.

The piece in The Atlantic cites other kluges in our daily lives, such as the bolted-together labyrinth of the US Federal tax code. I’d add the Interstate System, where no matter how many lanes we build, it never quite works and can grind to a halt after a single breakdown. That’s why I avoid Interstate travel at all costs, going by US Route or train.

Yet no advanced part of our transit system merits the word “kluge” more than certain airports. Newark springs to mind, as does O’Hare. Yet Heathrow is my favorite kluge of all.

No matter how often it gets a facelift or wonderful new terminal, it remains delightfully or maddeningly (depended on your departure time) “higgledy-piggledy,” to use a British term. I’ve gone up a flight of stairs at Heathrow, down a hall, turned 180 degrees, down a flight of stairs, all to end up in sight of where I began. If that is not a kluge, I do not know what is.

Shall we then get a ruling from that most UK of authorities on vocabulary, the OED? As fate has it, another kluge–the way we establish security online: a labyrinth of passwords, VPN connections, dual-factor authentication, casting of spells and praying to dark gods, so-called “secure clients” delayed me. It took two days to consult the OED online, then publish a notice of this post to Spiderbytes, our campus e-mail list.

I finally got through the decidedly klugey process to the OED; the entry there notes that our word as slang of recent origin, for a system improvised, lashed together, in the end “forming a distressing whole.’ ” That’s I-95, Heathrow, or my password list.

The earliest example of our word comes from 1962: The word ‘kludge’ is..derived from the same root as the German Kluge.., originally meaning ‘smart’ or ‘witty’… ‘Kludge’ eventually came to mean ‘not so smart’ or ‘pretty ridiculous’.

There must be a better way for getting to content behind a paywall or password gate than our current kluge: Iris scans? Blood sample? Replacing the kluge we currently use to identify ourselves online should be on the to-do lists of every major software company. Go ahead: invent it and you, not Elon Musk, will be teh first to land a big silver passenger rocket on Mars.

We’ll continue the blog through exams and the holiday break, so please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

top image courtesy of the Facebook group “Bikers and Riders.” Do not try that at home. Mixing Bowl I-95 kluge courtesy of Richard Layman at Flickr.

Metaphor of the Month! Sisyphean / Sisiphean

Poor King Sisyphus! Doomed by the gods of ancient Greece to roll a boulder up to the top of a hill, only to have the task fail, again and again, for all eternity.

Students, in November does finishing the semester seem Sisyphean? Or “Sisiphean,” if you prefer that spelling (both occur and can be considered standard). As WordPress recognizes and the OED gives us the “y version” I will continue with that one. Just be consistent when you employ the term in writing.

The lapse in studying Greek mythology disappoints me. I have a dark turn of mind in literature, so I love tales of woe, death, destruction, and crushed pride. They put many a vain schoolboy, even a little Edgar Allan Poe, in his place. Today, Sisyphus’ boulder seems stuck. The last recorded usage of our word by the OED: spelled with “y,” 2002; with “i,” 2007. With only three pips of eight on the OED’s usage frequency chart, is preserving our word a Sisyphean task?

In higher education, no. We are an old curiosity shop of language and a maker-space for new words or repurposed ones such as paradigm. So if you wish to be vivid in describing your endless, ever-repeating tasks, tell someone the work is Sisyphean.

Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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 Richard Croft.

Word of the Week! Sardonic

I enjoy a spooky post for Halloween, so this year to follow our 2018 Metaphor The Dark Night of the Soul, I have a word useful all year long.

Odd little boy that I was, I could not wait every month to grab a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland, a black-and-white magazine covering horror films. One cover’s image stayed with me a long time: the image of Mr. Sardonicus, a man who suffers to terrible a scare that his face gets twisted into an eternal, Joker-style grin. There is nothing happy about such a fate.

But is that “smile” of his really “sardonic”? Absolutely. According to the OED Entry, laughter or a smile meets the definition if done in a “bitter, scornful, mocking” way. That would also describe a great deal of humor in otherwise scary movies.

As one might guess, the term sardonicus provides the original for several words in Romance languages, as well as our English term, with usage first recorded in the 17th Century.

May all your goblins and ghouls bring only treats on October 31, and no sardonic tricks.

Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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 Wikipedia.