academic writing – Page 3 – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Swelter

I am really sorry if your Memorial Day plans got rained out. Okay, not really. I adore cool weather, even cool, wet weather. Despite growing up here, I have never loved our summers. I despise humidity and heat.

You’ll get your miserable summer soon enough. It will be sweltering, in fact. What does it mean to “swelter”? I like the word as much as I dislike its meaning, “to be oppressed by heat.” We tend to use the term as an adjective now, “sweltering,” rather than as a noun or verb. The last is the oldest form, a 15th Century usage noted in the OED entry.

Our word goes back to before the Little Ice Age and even the Medieval Warm Period to the Middle English sweltre, long before electric fans or air-conditioning made places like Virginia and points south habitable for (too many) millions of us.

In the sweltering decades to come I suspect this word will “enjoy” renewed usage. I’m around for 2 more decades, and sometimes I’m thankful it won’t be longer. As for the word, use it wisely; “hot” and “scorching” convey degrees of heat-induced suffering, while “sweltering” just sounds wicked. “Sizzling” has many meanings, but I think of hot dogs on my Weber grill or sun-bathers frying at the beach.

May you find cool shade this summer. I’ll be in Canada for part of it, my sort of climate, thank you. As you heat-lovers burn yourselves up with UV rays, pause a moment to 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.

Creative-Commons image courtesy of ChrisGoldNY at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Hyaline

Special thanks to Jessie Bailey, UR’s Assistant Director of Recruiting, Admission, and Student Services for this excellent and timely word. Jessie adds:

In the adjective form, it means having a glassy, translucent appearance. As a noun, it means “a thing that is clear and translucent like glass, especially a smooth sea or clear sky.”

It looks like it’s used in biology and entomology to describe things like human tissues and insect wings.

I came across it this past week in the book Solenoid by Mircea Catarescu, where it was easy to remember because he uses it a lot.

The OED entry seconds Jessie’s definitions, if you wish to take a look. The roots are Greek and Latin, for glass or crystal. You’ll find guidelines for pronunciation, too. In both British and US examples, “leen” or “line” work.

The metaphorical use for smooth, glassy water really strikes my fancy at this time of year. I hope your days are equally hyaline in the summer months ahead.

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.

Creative Commons image courtesy of Wallpaper Flare.

Word of the Week! Fruition

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

Word of the Week! Eminence Grise

I had never run into this phrase before encountering it, in a story from my course Reading Science Fiction and Fantasy. A student who pays close attention to new words–take heart, there are some!–pointed out the term and we talked about how it functions in the story.

In short, an eminence grise works quietly and decisively behind the scenes rather than serving as a public face for important events. We have a precise origin for our term, in the person of François Leclerc du Tremblay, a monk of the early 17th Century who advised Cardinal Richelieu. Our image, a painting from 1873, shows the respect (and likely fear) this publicly quiet man evoked among powerful French clergy and nobility. Though never a Cardinal (and thus worthy of “Your Eminence”) Tremblay was given that honorific, paired with his gray robes, we get our term.

One rarely sees our phrase, with a usage frequency of 2 (of 8) in the OED editors’ estimation. That’s “0.01 times per million words in typical modern English usage,” so I stand unsurprised that I’ve not met the term before.

“Power behind the throne” comes to mind as a possible synonum here, yet some of these figures have been very public. Another possibility is the word “Svengali,” worth a look in a future post.

Look at any circle of the powerful and influential and you’ll find an eminence grise, sometimes quietly working for good, often not. As usual these days, I asked ChatGPT if something like it might become an eminent grise. Here’s the response:

While it is possible for AI like myself to assist famous and influential individuals in various ways, it is unlikely that AI would become an eminent grise in the traditional sense.

This is because AI is designed to assist humans in performing specific tasks, such as generating text or making predictions based on data. While AI can be very helpful in many contexts, it lacks the complex decision-making abilities and nuanced understanding of human behavior that are often required to wield significant influence behind the scenes.

Would that more of my students wrote a first draft that well, and would that influencers (who do not act behind the scenes) possessed that level of humility.

Nominate a word students need to learn 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! Unconformity

A few days ago, I watched a moving and well made BBC video about how geologist James Hutton recognized what we now call Deep Time. That metaphor will appear in a future post.

Meanwhile, consider what the geologist saw when he looked at Siccar Point in eastern Scotland. As the Wikipedia entry puts it, an unconformity means “places where the junction between two types of rock formations can be seen.” I myself saw The Great Unconformity a little less than a year ago, when I spent three days at the South Rim of The Grand Canyon.Keep in mind that an unconformity implies missing material, too. Where rocks meet, millions of years of the earth’s history may have vanished without leaving a trace.

This realization puts our four-score (or so) years into a perspective that can be humbling, exhilarating, or terrifying to those who view an unconformity. More than a few viewers, faced with this dizzying truth, deny it.

No photos of such formations can do justice to the real thing. What I first saw on a hazy Northern Arizona afternoon sent me reeling. Such a vista, though smaller, sent Hutton and his companions into some colorful prose. John Playfair wrote “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.” Hutton noted how time suddenly seemed to have “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

Hutton and his friends were not the first to ponder Deep Time. Consider Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who wrote in his Meditations “What a tiny part of the boundless abyss of time has been allotted to each of us – and this is soon vanished in eternity.”

What about outside geology? As late as 1982, a writer referred to “unconformities” in Shakespeare’s history plays. As to what that statement implies about errors, or missing material, I don’t know. You can see other examples at The OED.

I rather cherish nonconformists, so I like this word for more than rocks. It merits wider use and even wider practice.

Nominate a word students need to learn 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 by Anne Burgess of “Hutton’s Section.” Grand Canyon image by me.

Metaphor of the Month! Moral Hazard

I try to sneak in words from the world of business here, and today’s metaphor comes just in time, as two banks associated with the Tech Sector have collapsed, or come so close that their assets got seized by the Federal Government.

Today, on my way in to work, I heard the term “moral hazard” associated with banking. I’d more likely consider it a term for a lost weekend in Las Vegas or New Orleans.

Investopedia provides a succinct definition for our metaphor that maps well onto what has happened recently, namely the “risk that a party has not entered into a contract in good faith or has provided misleading information about its assets, liabilities, or credit capacity. In addition, moral hazard also may mean a party has an incentive to take unusual risks in a desperate attempt to earn a profit before the contract settles.”

The entry continues to discuss the lack of consequences faced by the party who breaks faith and, let’s be honest, betrays the others involved. In the cases of our banks, they appear to have either taken on risky investments or engaged in other practices that put depositors’ money at risk.

It’s reprehensible to me, but then my financial advisor ranks me as a moderately conservative investor. I try to keep risks low, at least long-term ones.

So to me, playing with others’ money is immoral. The OED provides an 1875 date of first year, and it emphasizes an outcome rather than initial behavior. The entry cites the insurance industry, where “the effect of insurance on the likelihood of the insured event occurring; the lack of incentive to avoid risk,” which reminds me of the FDIC’s coverage, in theory, of only the first $250,000 in an account. The entry cites a recent example of usage, “Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, a free market think tank, argues that a big financial bail-out would risk creating perverse economic incentives or moral hazard.”

Will unlimited bail-outs of wealthy investors’ deposits create incentives for more risk-taking by new banks? Perhaps.

I’m not Cato-Institute material. I’d prefer we regulate banks tightly and punish more bankers with felony time, not punish the depositors (however wealthy). To me, these courses of action guarantee a moral outcome. Only one banker was jailed after the 2008 financial crisis. Fining banks did not stop what we are seeing today.

Nominate a word students need to learn 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 Nick Papakyriazis at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Embedded

I recently discovered this word, associated with “embedded journalists” during the Afghan and Iraqi wars, used for writing centers. No, we are not battlefields except for ideas and stylistic choices. Yet when we assign a Writing Consultant to a specific class, that employee gets called, at some other centers, “an embedded tutor.”

Seeking clarity for the first use of “embedded” in this sense, I tried The OED, but the dictionary only describes an item fixed inside another, with usage going back to the early 19th Century. Our final arbiter of definitions remains silent about the word, as modern metaphor.

Oxford Reference helps with etymology, giving a date of 2002 for a Pentagon strategy regarding reporters in war zones. Ostensibly the use of reporters attached to a military unit could have protected the non-combatants, yet as Oxford Reference’s entry notes, seconding what I have read in other accounts, at times the act of embedding resulted in journalistic bias, favoring the military or a particular operation.

As this blog does not directly concern itself with journalistic ethics or military affairs, I leave it for the reader to decide. Yet when we make a person part of a team, in an academic sense, can we likewise expect a completely unbiased result? I suspect that reasoning underlies the ex officio status of senior administrators on many academic committees. They step into discussions only when needed.

Where have you encountered our word?

Nominate a word students need to learn 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 Craig Duas at Flickr

Metaphor of the Month! Gordian Knot

Do you think that Alexander the Great cheated when he cut apart a knot that no one else could untie? Or used a different shortcut? Two versions of the story exist. You can read a history of this legend here, but I am more concerned with how an ancient event became a wonderful, if underused, metaphor today.

I encountered Gordian Knot to represent an intractable problem, only later learning it can imply a clever solution as soon soon as the right person shows up.

Remember Rubik’s Cube? It never went away, but at first no one could solve the problem. We had them all around our dorm rooms in the early 80s. Now in contests the cube can be solved in a few seconds. There’s a trick to that, Alexander might say.

Metaphorically, our term has been applied to geopolitics in areas ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The US National Debt (and its ever-rising limit) have been called Gordian Knots, as has human-driven climate change. Some knots got cut (the Soviet/US nuclear-arms standoff) only to be retied recently.

Students will encounter this metaphor in academic work; it hearkens back to a time when Classical metaphors abounded. I came on the scene in the twilight of that era and enjoy classics to this day. Have a look when you can, because these metaphors linger in modern academic prose.

image of work by Jean-Simon Berthélemy courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Volition

This word has a great deal of relevance when we discuss Open AI’s ChatGPT software. That program elicits responses that range from unreasoned panic to pedagogical curiosity among colleagues locally and globally.

We fear, in short, that a machine will replace us.

Yet the AI has no volition. The OED entry defines our word as “An act of willing or resolving; a decision or choice made after due consideration or deliberation; a resolution or determination.” It comes from Latin volo, “I wish” or “I will.”

I decided to ask the AI about this. It replied “No, I am a machine learning model and do not possess volition or consciousness. I can only respond based on the patterns and information in my training data.”

If Strong AI ever develops, it will be able to ask us questions by itself, taking our answers to improve its own code. No developers needed to tweak its 1s and 0s.

Let that give you some comfort, as you are readers endowed with volition, curiosity, and the ability to change the contents of your mind by applying those two marvels. Consider this question put to the AI:

Beatles or Rolling Stones?

The Rolling Stones is a legendary British rock band that formed in 1962. They are considered one of the most influential bands in the history of rock music, and have produced many iconic songs such as “Satisfaction,” “Brown Sugar,” “Start Me Up,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

On the other hand, I’m not aware of any specific references to “Lumpels” as a band, so I can’t make a comparison. Based on this context, I can say that The Rolling Stones is a more well-known and influential band compared to “Lumpels”.

Nominate a word students need to learn 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 Cylon Centurions courtesy of Dr. Gaius Baltar.

Word of the Week! Solvent

I build plastic models as a hobby, and for much of the work, among the adhesives I employ a glue that works as a solvent. It dissolves things, making parts stick by making polystyrene soft.

Our word has, in business, nearly a contrary meaning. One who is not bankrupt and can pay debts is also called “solvent.” Instead of taking away something, solvency here adds solidity. Or perhaps solvents that work as adhesives add strength by temporarily weakening?

Yet that cannot be the case: if you have worked with strong enough solvents, you know that they dissolve completely the substance called a solute, resulting in a solution. Yes, I got a C in college chemistry.

It amazes me that both senses of our word, the two most commonly heard nowadays, date to about the same time, if one studies the OED entry.

Incidentally, we often speak of the bankrupt as “insolvent,” a sense not used with chemicals (as far as I know).

This post will remain a mystery to me. Why did such different meanings emerge from the same Latin roots? That’s one of the things I most enjoy about looking at familiar-seeming words. “Solvent” has a frequency band of 6 (of 8) at the OED. it’s a daily word.

Nominate a word students need to learn 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 solvents courtesy of Wikipedia.