Category: academic writing

Word of the Week! Subfusc

Once again, Dr. Ted Bunn, UR Department of Physics, nominated our word. This time he picked one that was completely new to me. As Dr. Bunn put it in an e-mail:

It can just mean gloomy, apparently, but it can also mean “the formal clothing worn for examinations and formal occasions at some universities.” In Dorothy Sayers’s novel set at Oxford, she uses it to describe clothing in dark, subdued shades, suitable for wearing under academic regalia. I always think of it on graduation day.

Only one of my American dictionaries has a brief entry, supporting Professor Bunn’s conclusion that the word is British English, not its American cousin. The OED Online provides both senses of the word given above, as an adjective or noun. The Latin roots are plain, sub + fuscus (dusky). We have a similar derivation in obfuscate and obfuscation.

As recently at 2006, the Times of London noted that “Undergraduates at Oxford University have voted by four to one to retain subfusc costume when sitting examinations.” They voted again to retain it in 2015.  There are other specificities for subfusc at Oxford. As I learned from this article about the differences between it and Cambridge, subfusc means “a kind of uniform of a black suit, white shirt and black robe, plus a black tie for men and a black ribbon for women.”
The customs surrounded academic regalia have crossed the Atlantic far better than the word itself or, for that matter, the often subfusc weather of the British Isles. While I cannot find meteorological examples of the word, it certainly works in that context.

The image of a subfusc sky with the light just returning is my own, taken at twilight in Kenmare, Ireland in 2011.  The academic regalia of Oxford comes to us courtesy of Wikipedia.

This blog will continue all summer, so nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Word of The Week! Curmudgeon

Science-Fiction and Fantasy writer Fran Wilde, who works with my students when she’s on campus, once quipped “Joe, you are a misanthrope in danger of becoming a curmudgeon.”

Fran actually had that backwards, and that says a great deal about how fine a line exists between these words and, perhaps, who they represent. The Oxford English Dictionary Online only takes the term back to the 16th Century, in the sense of being mean-spirited and mistrustful. The word’s genesis, the OED notes, is unknown.

Like some curmudgeons I have known, then, our word seems to have just shown up to spoil our days. The American Heritage Dictionary also reveals that for two centuries, attempts to find the origin of the word have failed. The term has, moreover, shifted in what it signifies. For a long time, the elusive curmudgeon often was depicted as old, mean, and miserly. Think of Ebeneezer Scrooge (a character I portrayed in our 6th Grade Christmas play). Lately the grasping miser seems to have given way to a merely grumpy old geezer, usually male. Thus my Simpsons’ example.

So short-tempered, mistrustful, grumpy? That’s me, Fran. But a hater of all mankind? Nonsense! That would be someone like Mark Twain late in his life, who wrote in an 1898 notebook entry that “The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned.” Those are the words of someone who really hates the entire species: a misanthrope.  You see it in his later work, especially after A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

I hope my fate is gentler than the hero of that novel or, for that matter, its author. Writing this has me grinning, something curmudgeons rarely do. So perhaps there is hope. Just stay off my lawn this summer!

This blog will continue through the balmy months, so nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

 

Word of the Week! A Priori

Yes, I know it is two words, but you will hardly ever encounter this phrase or its counterpart a posteriori outside academia. Inside it, the Latin term speaks volumes and appears often enough to merit recognition in the blog. The phrase occurs as adjective and adverb. I often run into it, casually, as a noun. That usage does not appear in my references (but I like it anyway).

I first puzzled over a priori concepts (and had more than a few of them toppled)in the early 1980s, when I was an undergrad at The University of Virginia.  As I came to understand it then, the term meant “principles we assume to be true with out any further questioning,” an idea that I came to see as fundamentally at odds with academic inquiry. A priori ideas were, in my graduate program at Indiana heavy with postmodern literary theory, lampooned.

I suppose this a priori statement would get the founder of UVA, Thomas Jefferson, in trouble were he to write in an essay for some of my grad-school classes:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That Declaration gave us one of the most famous a priori statements in recorded history and began a revolution that one hopes has not ended. But wait. It appears that I need more schooling before I make any claims a priori.  I assumed something, and as a student once said in class, ” ‘assume’ makes an ass of ‘u’ and me.”

When I open the pages of The American Heritage Dictionary, my sense of our phrase comes third. Instead, the reference book gives “proceeding from a known or assumed cause” pride of place. The OED Online puts my sense of a priori second, as “in accordance with one’s previous knowledge or prepossessions.”  The dictionary also provides a clear 1862 example, “Reason commands us, in matters of experience, to be guided by observational evidence, and not by à priori principles.”

We have lost the accent over the “a,” but I lost more in my reasoning without further investigation.  Both reference works imply that a priori ideas do not provide the final word for anything. They are, instead, merely presuppositions for making future claims. That works well with fundamental principles of academic reasoning. H.W Fowler’s classic A Dictionary of Modern English Usage links a priori reasoning to deduction. Mr. Holmes would be proud of us.

A priori reasoning works well outside revolutionary manifestos, the Humanities, or detective work; it is, in fact, essential in the natural sciences. In physics, bodies near the Earth fall at 32 feet per second per second. It was not until Galileo’s era that we came to understand how gravity is related to the mass of a planet and would not be the same on other heavenly bodies. Empirical evidence followed.  That new scientific principle became, then, a new a priori concept for those working in the field.

With the end of the semester nigh, consider the a priori concepts you have had challenged or overturned in your life’s journey. More will follow, a posteriori when learning new ideas. I leave that up to the reader to learn, along with the meanings of a posteriori.

This blog will continue all summer, so nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here. If  you want to read more about whether Sherlock Holmes employs deductive or inductive reasoning, have a peek here.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Penultimate

This post will run the final week of classes, but it is really the penultimate week for academic work here: do not forget your final exam week, students!

The word itself has a decidedly academic “look” to it, but I find it used as often in journals of ideas such as The Atlantic Monthly. I brought doughnuts to class today, our next-to-last writing workshop of the semester. For that penultimate class, however, I would never ask  “who ate the penultimate doughnut”?

The OED Online, online or in print, gives our word first as a noun, a form I rarely see in formal usage today. The adjectival form appears far more often, though I had never before encountered the now rare mathematical use meaning “Relating to or designating a member of a family of curves that is arbitrarily close to a degenerate form.”

A Merriam-Webster post points out a usage error for this term. Never use it in formal writing to mean “last.” Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage seconds that opinion. The word gets employed to mean “the best of the best” but that usage is also incorrect. Our word always means “next to last.”  I could see it being acceptable in casual usage as “the best for now, until something better arrives to replace it.”

The final word remains out on penultimate; in a century, it may mean exactly “the best, so far,” until a better word shows up.

Nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! “Analyzation”

I usually focus on words I like, but this one needs comment, if only to keep more students from using it. It cropped up in a midterm, and I marked but did not penalize it greatly.

Note that I used “penalize” rather than “punish.” The former word exemplifies “derivation,” where an affix (prefix or suffix) gets attached to a word to create a new one. Thus, from “penal” we get “penalize.”  I am not overly fond of words made with the “-ize” suffix, for no good reason other than their sound. Thus I do not put them in my list of faculty pet peeves. Like an ugly new car that gradually looks better over the  years, “-ize” verbs seem to beat down purists about style and usage.  I barely notice “penalize” now, considering it a less punitive synonym for “punish.”

Not so for “analyzation.” Consider its root: “analysis,” a word as old as Ancient Greece. The Online Etymology Dictionary supports that honorable origin. As with many “-ize” words, “analyze” provides us with a neologism that does powerful work. I use it as the soul of my courses where students analyze literary work. In fact, it’s the most powerful intellectual skill a student can hone in college, where I often tell writers “tell me what you learned. Even if I know the subject already, you can analyze what is new to you. That will then be new again to me.”

But the popular student word “analyzation” takes word-derivation a step too far, like a Rube Goldberg machine with too many steps to perform an action. A writer using our word simply makes a longer synonym for “analysis” that to a novice or careless reader sounds professional but actually, as in the title of a well respected essay by scholar David Bartholomae, merely provides another instance of “Inventing the University” rather than learning how we academics actually talk and write.

Moral: Never avoid analysis, but avoid “analyzation” at all costs.

Nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Valence

Special thanks to Rita Willett, MD, Healthcare Studies and Department of Biology, for our word this week. This is her second nomination and, as a writer, I can say that nothing is more pleasing than “regulars” who read one’s work.

Dr. Willett provides a term that I knew though chemistry classes, indicating particular types of chemical bonds. It appears in many other fields, all of them indicating a bond of some sort. Scouting about with Google, I found a use from linguistics, where valence indicates the number of words in a sentence to which another word, especially a verb, can bond. An verb such as “give” has a valence of three; it makes no sense alone, requiring itself (valence of 1) as well as a direct (2) and indirect object (3), as in “give me the dictionary!”

Dr. Willett and her students encountered our word through NIH’s RDoC Matrix, a graph ranking psychological motivations and threats according to positive or negative “valences.”

At first glance, the word’s meaning in psychology drifts a bit from its use in chemistry or immunology, where it also indicates a binding action for antibodies or antigens. The use of the term in psychology dates back only a century, with the OED Online providing a 1917 example, but one from 1935, in a book called A Dynamic Theory of Personality, really captures the meaning well: “A certain object or event..is experienced as an attraction (or repulsion)… We shall say of such objects that they possess a ‘valence’.”

There, then, in our bond, much like that in other fields. One positive valence I found at the NIH site is, in fact, chemical. Consider the reward given by the brain when it releases dopamine. Get a “like” online (or a regular reader responding at your blog) and you get a little dose of it, naturally.

This is why I often critique smart phones, calling them addictive “dopamine dispensers” and banning their use in class. But I digress, perhaps to release some other pleasant brain chemical related to smugness or curmudgeon-ism.

Looking for images in the Creative Commons of “dopamine reward” led to all sorts of negative valences that had me fretting about wasting professional time, since so many images were simply the same drawing of a human brain with the areas highlighted that are linked to dopamine. On the other hand, laughter must be a positive valence, and short clips of Homer Simpson being forced to eat an infinite number of donuts in Hell came up too under “dopamine reward.” This led me to Homer having a nightmare about “The Planet of the Donuts” where he’s accused of eating half the population.

Find those on your own. Right now, my brain craves the positive valence of consuming a donut, a word I prefer to spell “doughnut.” Then the negative valence of guilt for eating two, not one. I hope the valences that influence your behavior are all positive, from getting enough sleep, rewards, and positive habits.

Correction 4/9/18: I had originally noted “valence” as the spelling for a type of window treatment. As Dr. Willett pointed out, that is a “valance.” I swear I saw it listed with an “e” in one of my dictionaries. Perhaps I need an entry for “ophthalmologist.”

Nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Absurd

Isn’t it wonderful to have a day dedicated to playing jokes on each other? This post honors April Fool’s Day, a last vestige of festivals from Antiquity such as Saturnalia, where the social order turned upside down.

I began my hunt for the right word by a simple Google search, to find a synonym for “foolish.” Then, looking at “absurd,” I thought how absurd the nonsense word “google” is, having no etymology I could imagine other than a now-forgotten, and rather foolish, cartoon character. Thinking about Google, as well as using it did, however, give us a word for a very special day.My go-to for the history of words, The OED Online, suggests a dual French and Latin parentage for our word, with absurde indicating something “contrary to common sense.” That 14th Century continued into English, with the OED’s examples dating back as far as the 1500s. In Hamlet, we have this: “Fie, tis a fault to heauen, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd.”

Unless one is an Adsurdist artist, the absurd is, at best, done deliberately to have fun or make fun of others. Real fools, however, do not recognize their absurdity or even deliberately embark on foolhardy adventures. That sense of reason and absurdity being at odds stands today. That makes “absurd” anything but absurd in formal usage; so many terms drift but this one, like the fool who persists in foolishness, remains delightfully unchanged.

Next week we have a faculty-nominated word from the sciences. It enshrines reason to counteract our foolish pursuits. For now, however, be a bit absurd as you play harmless tricks on friends and family.

Update: This post troubled me because “absurd” does not seem to come from the word “surd” plus the “ab” affix. I found this list of words that employ “ab” in the sense of “away from,” as in “abnormal.” By coincidence, “ab” was the site’s “word root of the day.”

Nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Word of the Week! Fulsome

This word has bothered me for many years. It provides a good example of Edward Sapir’s theory of Linguistic Drift, and I warn writers to take care when using this intellectual-sounding adjective. It has drifted from a positive sense to a negative one and back to positive again!

Often I hear journalists on radio, or more likely corporate or governmental officials, describing the “fulsome praise” heaped upon this or that person. There’s a problem here; these speakers mean “generous” or “universal” when one older meaning of fulsome is, in fact, a little stinky.  If we add the verb “heaped” it all becomes, well, piled higher and deeper in its fulsomeness.

The word is English and it is very old. The OED Online cites uses from as early as the 14th Century, and this lovely example a century closer to us, “As a fulsome well Shedith his stream in to þe ryvere” can be updated to, “as a fulsome well sheds its stream into the river.”  Here the sense is copious, overflowing, positive.  And therein lies a problem with “fulsome,” as well as its closeness, phonetically, to the unabashedly bad “foul.” The OED notes that fulsome acquired a dubious reputation thanks to that kinship, though in recent years the positive aspect of fulsome  gained more usage.

A 19th Century example from the OED helps, “My complaint of the world..is this—that there is too much of everything..and so I could go on enumerating..all the things which are too full in this fulsome world. I use fulsome in the original sense.”

In this original sense, fulsome means “too much of a good thing.” It is one thing to be praised, another entirely to be fawned over by a sycophant. That sense of excess takes us to the OED’s other definitions. They include fleshy, obnoxious, overfed, lewd, bawdy, dirty, difficult to digest, filthy!  In my mind’s eye I immediately envisioned the engravings of William Hogarth, whose “Tavern Scene” from the series “The Rake’s Progress” appears above.  Try as I might, we are back to Spring Break Bacchanalia, after all!

An 1828 example from the OED is “the close, hot, fulsome smell of bad ventilation.” My 1953 edition of  Webster’s New Collegiate gives no positive definitions, emphasizing only the offensive nature of the term. My more recent American Heritage Dictionary, a volume that includes usage notes, warns readers about the double-edged meaning of our word of the week.

We have lost most derogatory senses of the word, along with the noun form of fulsome, but I remain uncomfortable when I hear about “fulsome praise,” perhaps the last holdout of a word that describes excess in all its forms. Again, I am reminded of Hogarth’s satirical drawings. The Rake’s Progress did not end well.

We have here not a question of grammar or even proper usage but rather of precise usage. So the next time you plan to honor someone who had received a reward, you might instead talk or write about “universal praise,” “widely praised,” “acclaimed,” or “greatly honored.” I, for one, would leave “fulsome” behind, unless you want to poke fun at someone being followed around by a platoon of yes-men.

Update, 3/26/18: I took a peek at Bryan Garner’s excellent A Dictionary of American Usage for advice. He calls fulsome a “skunked term,” meaning that the scent of its earlier (in this case, negative) meaning clings to it for a long time. Garner suggests “lavish” as an alternative adjective when speaking of praise.

Nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Hogarth image courtesy of The Victorian Web.

 

 

 

Word of the Week! Pedagogy


Special thanks to Lisa Bayard, Manger of Tyler’s at UR, for this excellent pick. After the Bacchanalia ends, we must return to our studies.

I teach a course entitled “Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” and students rightly assume that the final word has something to do with the theory of teaching. For many years, poor student of Classical languages that I am, I mistakenly assumed that the “peda” in our word related to the Latin pedestere, to go around on foot. One often follows a mentor, like ducklings following mom. So that was that, as far as my defining the origins of “pedagogy.”

How wrong I was! While pedestere gives us the modern “pedestrian,” my thinking was rather pedestrian indeed, not have have checked a few good dictionaries.

During Spring Break, I am far from my printed dictionaries in Boatwright Library on campus, but I have the OED Online to follow me, like those ducklings, wherever I go. Their entry shows a history stretching back to Ancient Greece and, later in the Mediterranean world, Latin paedagogia. In English, by the 17th Century a “pedagogy” could mean not only the art of teaching but also the profession itself or a place where teaching gets done.

Today we generally refer to the system or theory of teaching when we use the word as a noun or adjective, as in “we practiced several pedagogical techniques for teaching the history of language.” I have heard teachers called “pedagogues” in older books; that term has faded from common usage.

Nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Word of the Week! Bacchanalia

With Spring Breaks blooming like daffodils across America, I decided that I would nominate a word myself.

In case my choice gives offense, I admit–and dare hope–that most students will do community service, visit family, or engage in healthy and safe activities during their Spring Breaks. In my experience, I was too poor to go anywhere except right home.

Such a low-key respite from schoolwork is not, however, the reputation of the annual student holiday. In fact, we have an ancient and sacred ancestor for today’s decidedly profane revelries, a term that managed to survive two millennia without much alteration: Bacchanalia. Bacchus, the Roman god of “wine, freedom, intoxication and ecstasy” (Wikipedia), survives as well; he seems a less dangerous re-branding of the Greek Dionysus. In those earlier rites, people got ripped limb from limb by the followers of  the god.

Bacchus’ festivals, purportedly still celebrated at every Spring Break hotspot, can be dangerous indeed.  This must account for the negative sense in which the term and its synonym “bacchanal” have been used during my lifetime. As recently as 2016, at my alma mater The University of Virginia, an article in The Cavalier Daily reported on “this year’s Block Party — an unsanctioned bacchanal which took place on Wertland Street last Saturday.”

I leave the nature of  the rites that constitute “excess,” up to readers’ discretion. More than one martini constitutes excess to me, these days, if not the drunken disasters so often synonymous with Bacchanalia. The OED Online traces that sense of the word, a secular version of the ancient partying, to the 17th Century. My other dictionaries also raise a glass in the same direction.

If you engage in singing about drinking, you will also be singing a “Bacchanal” or “Bacchanalia.” Those usages seem as lost to us now as the proverbial lost weekend.

So have a safe and sober Spring Break. Remember, as poet, printer, and mystic William Blake wrote, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” But only if you make it that far.

Nominate a word by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

See all of our Words of the Week here.