etymology – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week Update! Googly Eyes

Being an academic includes, believe it or not, a measure of humility. So when I covered this term here before, I wrote “my money, as well as Wikipedia’s, is on Barney Google, a nearly forgotten cartoon character. ”

I may have lost that bet. There’s some evidence that Barney’s popularity led to a shift in an existing term.

While doing some research on sites to visit in Northumbria, in service of a long-term plan to walk the Hadrian’s Wall Path, I came across the legend of The Lambton Worm, a crawling horror dispatched by local nobleman, Sir John Lambton. As a lad he went fishing and caught the creature, when it too was a youngster. He disposed of the strange “fish” by tossing it in a well, and trouble followed. You may recall the legend if you saw Ken Russell’s B-movie adaptation of Bram Stoker’s reportedly awful novel, The Lair of the White Worm.

I hope to visit the scene of these adventures, south of Newcastle, when I begin my rambles across the north of England. As for my evidence that I was wrong earlier about googly eyes? Doubts began when I found a folk-song composed in 1867 by Clarence M. Leumane, and I’ll quote part of it here, after Sir John unwisely tosses the baby worm down a well:

But the worm got fat an’ grewed an’ grewed,
An’ grewed an aaful size;
He’d greet big teeth, a greet big gob,
An greet big goggly eyes.

The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that our “googly eyes” comes from the older “goggly eyes” of the song, and, further back, to the 1530s and Middle English.

Sorry Barney Google, our term is far older than you. Perhaps Barney’s pop-eyed look helped morph “goggly-eyes” to “googly-eyes”?

Send words, stick-on googly eyes, monster legends, and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Images: Picpik.com and Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Shuffle

Here’s a word of common parlance with an interesting etymology. We think of shuffling cards or perhaps walking slowly along, dragging our feet. Both meanings exist alongside each other and pose no problems for native speakers of English. My gut instinct told me that the sliding motion of cards when shuffling them (unlike cutting a deck of cards) gives us a hint of the origin.

The Online Etymology Dictionary provides both the “Middle English shovelen “to move with dragging feet,” and well as a possible “Low German schuffeln ‘to walk clumsily, deal dishonestly.’ ” That latter meaning gives us a possible link to the noun “shuffle,” which can be a trick or deceit.

At last, I know what was on the minds of the geniuses at Warner Brothers who created my favorite deep-fried Southern trickster and foil for Bugs Bunny, Colonel Shuffle. He’s a thin-skinned Southern aristocrat in a few cartoons, including the memorable “Mississippi Hare,” with Bugs getting the best of Shuffle at every turn, leading to one of the finest lines in cartoon history when Shuffle is shoved over the side of a riverboat, “Why did you dunk my poor old hide in Ol’ Man River?” Shuffle appeared elsewhere, usually as the butt of jokes rather than playing them, try as he might.

Shuffle is descended from not only Mark Twain’s King and Duke but a long series of picaresque characters that came before the Civil War. When Shuffle declares that he is “the rip-roarin’-est, gold-diggin’-est, sharp-shootin’-est, poker-playin’-est riverboat gambler on the Mississippi!,” he uses boasts we associate with Davy Crockett, Sut Lovingood, Simon Suggs, and other real and fictional “ring-tailed roarers” of Southern-frontier history and tall tales. All of them were expert at playing tricks and pulling cons on gullible strangers.

Good thing they never shuffled their cards around Bugs Bunny, Doc.

Send words, card tricks, and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Image: Col. Shuffle’s card-game shuffle–5 aces!

Word of the Week! Hootenanny

I’d planned this word for Burn’s Night, the January 25th celebration of Scotland’s national Bard. Like Galoot, I figured the word to be of Scots origin, but as with Galoot, the etymology of hootenanny proves unusual. I’m now calling it an American neologism of the year 1900 or so.

My erroneous thinking can be traced to by a couple of fine nights of drinking pints and listening to music at a pub of that name in Inverness. It’s a fine venue for “trad” or modern music and the crowd is friendly. In any case, our word seems American in origin. At Etymology Online, we find either an informal gathering of folk musicians, as compared to any old jam session, or (new to me) a type of tool used by car-thieves in the early 1930s. The OED gives it a first use of 1906, in a similar sense of “thingumajig,” “doo-dad,” or “whatchamacallit.”

In any case, in Inverness I attended a hootenanny, since we had lots of locals come by to play traditional tunes. There’s a long tradition at work here; across sea in Ireland, we’d call that a céilí; in Scots’ Gaelic, it’s cèilidh. I hope you encounter one in your lifetime; travel to small places in the Celtic lands, as we like to do–no packaged tours!–and you’ll find them. They can include poetry and dance, too. The most haunting for me? An old man singing a traditional ballad a capella in the back room of a tiny pub on the island of Inishmore, a couple of years back. It brought a bunch of young toughs who were with him to respectful silence. We all raised our glasses when the singer finished to toast the gentleman, and the whisky and stout ran like a river afterwards while a band played popular tunes.

As for this side of the Atlantic, I’m too young to recall the TV show for folk performers that ran briefly in the early 60s. The network would not allow Pete Seeger to perform unless he signed what amounted to a loyalty oath to the US, a late-blooming weed from McCarthy’s witch-hunts of a decade earlier. Seeger refused, and others boycotted the show. It’s a distant prelude to the Kennedy Center fiasco currently underway.

Set aside today’s rancor and enjoy some locally sourced live music soon. It might not be a hootenanny, but you’ll be continuing an old tradition. As for our word? I was planning to place it with “shindig” in our list of endangered words. When did you last hear either?

Wrong, again, Mister Blogger. There’s a revival for our word since 2000. The frequency chart at the OED shows a steady rise in usage until 1990, then a dip and recovery. I am pleased to report that are back to peak hootenanny. Is a might wind a-blowin’ again for folk music?

If you have seen Christopher Guest’s film, you’ll get the reference. My musical tastes run more to glam, Americana, Brit Pop, Celtic (Trad or modern), and post-punk than to 1950s-60s American folk, but this film is a must-see for its humor and one big, endearing hootenanny.Send words, folk songs, and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Image: Wikipedia page for that long-gone TV show

Word of the Week! Charlatan

Our trivia team, “Electric Mayhem,” got stumped by this word this week, so I decided I’d cover it.

Our trivia-host stated that he wanted a term that came from the Italian word “to babble” for a type of confidence man. We wrote down this week’s word, but we figured that the origin of our word was French, so we erased it. We’d have still lost that round, and so it goes.

Like “Montebank” that I’ve covered here before, this week’s work is of Italian parentage yet it shares French roots as well. I’ll use the same image. Whereas Montebank comes from the monta in banco, “to stand on a bench” TO sell that snake-oil, “Charlatan” has a more complex etymology. From The Etymology Dictionary Online:

“one who pretends to knowledge, skill, importance, etc.,” 1610s, from French charlatan “mountebank, babbler” (16c.), from Italian ciarlatano “a quack,” from ciarlare “to prate, babble,” from ciarla “chat, prattle,” which is perhaps imitative of ducks’ quacking.

Today we have charlatans online, promising us miracles. We have others in positions of great power. We have many who blog. I hope this post, at least, might babble a bit but present you with an accurate origin on a still-popular word.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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.

Word of the Week! Blizzard

Blizzard conditions rarely appear in this part of the Mid-Atlantic, but one never knows. My undergrad students, who too often live their lives from day to day (ah, youth) don’t check the weather. They may wish to cast an eye on the forecast this weekend. While we may not get an epic fall of snow, we might get wind and very low temperatures.

Some will call that a blizzard. I would not. I “enjoyed” blizzard conditions exactly once, trying to drive a car ill equipped (’77 Volare, if I recall) that belonged to other folks from Bloomington, IN to Edwardsville, IL. The Interstate was coated with snow, which for a rear-wheel drive car wasn’t too bad. The wind was so strong, however, that it moved us around and created whiteout conditions. At 20mph or so, it took is all day to reach our destination.

What is a blizzard, technically? Etymology Online, where I went for the history of the word, has it as a “strong, sustained storm of wind and cold, and dry, driving snow,” which could described what we see from Saturday into Sunday in Virginia. The term is of American origin, with its sense of snowfall dating to 1859. Older uses of the term, perhaps related to the comfy term “blaze” appeared earlier, meaning ” ‘a violent blow,’ also ‘hail of gunfire’ in American English from 1829, and blizz “violent rainstorm” is attested from 1770.”

My wood stove is blazing as I write this, though the fire brings comfort, not fear. We heat with wood on the farm and have a furnace as backup, yet I suppose I need to make some blizzard plans soon. That won’t include going to the supermarket. I suspect they are already being raided by shoppers in a blind panic.

Come what may stay warm, and go outside only to enjoy the hiss of falling snow, the silence that follows, and the joy of sliding down a hill on a sled. I plan to do all of them.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Creative-Commons image of The Flatiron Building, NYC, courtesy of Thinking Humanity.

Word of the Week! Milquetoast

Hello, 2026 Spring Semester. I’m not teaching this term, as I edit an anthology of essays about AI’s impact upon writing classrooms, programs, and centers. It will certainly generate more words for this blog.

Meanwhile, let’s look at a term that I use a bit, but whose origin came from before my time. I didn’t know the etymology until ran across a reference in David Michaelis’ outstanding biography of Charles M. Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts. The famous cartoonist’s career briefly overlapped that of H.T. Webster’s The Timid Soul, a strip that gave the world a meek protagonist, Caspar Milquetoast. When Charlie Brown is at his Charlie-Browniest, there’s a bit of Caspar in his humiliation. You can read more about Webster’s comic series here.

For several decades, timid people were called milquetoasts, after Casper.

The character’s name comes from milk-toast, a dish we don’t see much these days. It’s a bland concoction of toasted bread soaked in milk, perhaps sweetened or seasoned mildly. More for you! Having just made some spoonbread, which I do find wonderful, that’s as bland and inoffensive as I need while I still have teeth in my skull.

We no longer frequently hear this week’s word, one that qualifies as a neologism or newly coined word, alas. “Wimp” has taken its place. The OED has two instances of it being spelled “milktoast” with the same meaning. Unusually for that dictionary, I couldn’t find a frequency-of-use chart; it’s hiding behind a tree somewhere, like Mister Milquetoast.

Pop-culture icons come and go, but sometimes they leave us a word. I covered googly eyes here some time ago; cartoon character Barney Google gave us that one. I do wonder what linguistic influences Peanuts will leave us in a few decades? I do sometime see damaged or deformed Christmas trees marked as “Charlie Browns” at reduced prices.

Please do not be a milquetoast or a Charlie Brown. Put your googly eyes to work and send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Image: Caspar M tries not to give offense, even to a sign on the wall.

Word of the Week! Fugue

I had a college roommate who enjoyed learning new words. One day he said “I had a vision while in a fugue state.” He meant that half-awake, half-asleep moment when you might recall a dream to be lost by the first cup of coffee.

Fugues in music I knew, and The OED gives us a definition that dates to a first use in the 16th Century, “A polyphonic composition constructed on one or more short subjects or themes, which are harmonized according to the laws of counterpoint, and introduced from time to time with various contrapuntal devices.” You know a fugue when you hear one. They are hard to forget.

What of my roommate’s sense of the word? He was a surf-punk rocker, not Bach. Then we get this definition, just by scrolling down below all that music, “A flight from one’s own identity, often involving travel to some unconsciously desired locality.” This usage dates to 1901 and comes from psychology. You’ll find more on the phenomenon here.

So my roomie was using our word incorrectly; he was aware of himself when in that transition between sleep and alertness and began to keep a dream-journal. Pro tip: If you want to record those visions from sleep, keep a notebook by the bed and scribble down details before you lose them. Artists tend to do these things. Or perhaps some dreams, like fugue states, are best forgotten?

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

image: creative-commons image from Lumen Learning.

Metaphor of the Month! Stendhal Syndrome

I would wager that unless you have read Michael Finkel’s excellent book The Art Thief, you’ve not encountered our November metaphor. Finkel tells the true story of Stéphane Bréitwieser, who amassed a collection of stolen art with an estimated value of two billion dollars. Instead of selling what he stole, the thief built what amounted to his own private gallery where he felt the works would be better appreciated than in a museum.

Bréitwieser would be so transported emotionally by certain priceless artwork that he’d be obsessed with owning it. Finkel and those experts he interviewed attribute this to Stendhal Syndrome; our Wikipedia page on the topic notes that rapid heartbeat, dizziness, hallucinations, even fainting can be symptoms. For Bréitwieser, he was so moved that he had to steal, and this of course led to his eventual arrest.

I tried to think hard about when such reactions occurred for me; perhaps seeing the Bosch paintings in the Prado for the first time in 1985. I have revisited them several times, and my reactions are still strong. I’d say the same for Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The writer Stendahl (Marie-Henri Beyle) was overcome by emotion when first visiting Florence’s Basilica of Santa Croce; others have fainted in museums or become dizzy; one person had a heart attack while viewing Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

We need a different term for what I experienced when I first saw sunset over the Wellsville Mountains in Utah; it was a euphoria that verged on mania, very different from the majestic serenity of catching that moment three times on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in 2022.

The overwrought reactions of Stendhal Syndrome seem quite different from when a work of art, a landscape, or a piece of music bring us great joy or tears. So what works of art move you so deeply that you fear you might faint?

See you in the museum. The VMFA collection is varied and, in many spots, sublime (we need a Word-of-The-Week post for that term). With a little more time on my hands since switching to part-time work, I’ve increased both my reading as well as my museum visits. After reading about Bréitwieser, I’ll never look at artwork the same way again.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Image Source: Wikipedia

Word of the Week! Limbo

Monday’s Wordle at The York Times gave me our word. I thought not of the Caribbean dance but of my Catholic upbringing.

I’m a Unitarian-Universalist these days, but I fondly recall tormenting a poor priest with questions that included “who changes all those diapers?” After all, Limbo in Catholic theology is a region of the afterlife where unbaptized infants went. As Catholic schoolboys are wont to do, I asked lots of other questions: where do these babies live? (on clouds) what do they eat? (no need), then, the diaper question (no food, no need for diapers). “Why can’t they just go to Heaven?” got an answer I don’t today recall, something about Original Sin. Religious Studies class (and I) moved on.

Despite press reports several years back, The Vatican has not canceled Limbo but in fact left the concept in…well, Limbo. It remains an unresolved theological theory. You can read about Limbo’s history here, and it includes links to the latest Papal pronouncements.

As this is not a blog on theology, let’s get to the issue at hand: words that move around as if they are dancing the Limbo. I thought the dance and the afterlife shared something. They both involve dangling between two states. In the dance, one hovers between standing and falling backward. For those floating, never-hungry babies, they drift between our word and eternity.

Yet both terms have different origins! They thus are contranyms. For the theological term, our word comes from Latin limbus, edge or border (see our modern academic darling of a word, the overused “liminal”).

The term for a dance may come from limber, to be flexible, of 16th century first recorded use but unknown origin. Mystery upon mystery, today! The first recorded use of Limbo as a part of the afterlife is much older, from the 14th Century as the OED reports.

I danced the Limbo (rather well for pre-Yoga me) in my 30s at a nephew’s wedding reception. Even if you have not tried that, you have certainly felt stranded in Limbo during phone-holds, airport departure gates, or in waiting rooms.

Limbo retains healthy frequency of usage, for those reasons. Consider how common this week’s word is, then get up and shake your body, Senora. It’s what Harry Belafonte advises.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Image: Screencap by me from the film Beetelejuice, which has both Limbo the place and Limbo the dance. Jump in the line!

Word of the Week! Benchmark

In my course “Writing With And About AI” my students have been discussing benchmark testing for large language models and how companies might be “cheating on the tests” by pre-loading the test questions into their AIs. That phenomenon is called “benchmark contamination.”

If proven true for major firms that provide popular models such as Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI, it portends that progress in AI “intelligence” may be greatly exaggerated by those firms as they seek customers and investment capital.

This blog is not about AI per se, but the use of “benchmark” got me thinking of my drill press and shop bench on the farm. Careful measurements matter, so where exactly did “benchmark” come from?

Not the shop bench, as I haphazardly guessed in class. Instead, the OED entry notes that for surveyors’ tools, such “a mark takes the form of a horizontal groove cut in a surface, into which the upper surface of an angle iron would once have been inserted, forming a level surface or ‘bench’ to support a levelling staff.” If you have had the pleasure of looking at the high level of detail on British Ordinance Survey Maps, you will quickly grasp how important a good benchmark proves for careful measurements. First usage recorded is 1826 from the US, during the surveying for the Ohio and Chesapeake Canal, and the etymology remains a simple compound of two common English words.

You may use our word as noun or verb without attracting the fury of grammatical purists. If you do, just tell them “benchmark that!” and wave an angle iron at them.

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Image: “Mapping a feature” from Wessex Archaeology, via Flickr