Category: language

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! Amortize

The world of business provides few enough beautiful words, but this week’s is a favorite of mine, less for its mouthfeel and more for its utility. A person shows both their age and their financial sense when they can employ “amortize” and “amortization” well.

As its roots show, the word has something to do with death. That usage, The OED Online tells us, stretches back to the late Middle Ages, with a 14th Century example from Chaucer’s “The Parson’s Tale” provided. In 1656, T. Blount’s dictionary, Glossographia, notes “Amortize, to deaden, kill, or slay.”

That’s not what my tax accountant meant when he told me that we could amortize our equipment purchases over several years, if we wanted to write off our farming expenses. I imagine myself shooting holes in the 500 gallon cistern I use to collect rainwater for irrigation.

No, this sense of retiring a debt for equipment or liquidating something gradually appears, like modern business practices themselves, only in the 19th Century. All other morbidity clinging to the word and its nominalized form, “amortization,” have long vanished from living memory.

So consider this post a memento mori for all those other senses of “amortize,” here at the end of the academic year.

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.

Creative-Commons image provided courtesy of Pixabay.

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! 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! Equanimity

Special thanks to Rita Willett,  MD, Healthcare Studies and Department of Biology, for our word this week.  As with our word in the last post, “equanimity” is hard to say and even harder to spell, but it speaks volumes in print.

It provides just the right lexical item for a factious, even frightening time. The OED Online provides These definitions:

“The quality of having an even mind. . . .Fairness of judgement, impartiality, equity.”

Let’s try it in a medical sense, given our source: “Patients went beyond noting how the physician’s advice was medically sound; they emphasized her equanimity in treating the elderly with dignity.”

The term’s history reaches to the 17th Century, with public servant and private diarist Samuel Pepys using our word in much the same way we would today. If the term has fallen out of favor, I wonder if equanimity itself has waned? That virtue, as well as its signifier, deserve better.

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 of Samuel Pepys courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Word of the Week! Crepuscular

Dr. Ted Bunn, UR Department of Physics, nominated our word. I have always thought of the term in relation to the raccoons and possums, those banes of my chicken flock, or groundhogs, terrors of my garden. Without going into the gory details, let’s just say that as the light fails or grows, I have violently curtailed many of these creatures’ crepuscular activities. Such animals are usually only spotted at dawn or dusk, very rarely in broad daylight. The same goes for the red fox that helps me control their populations. It can best be observed at the verge of the forest at twilight.

Our word means associated with, or active in, twilight.  The Oxford English Dictionary Online has examples dating back as far as the 17th Century, and these add the sense of “indistinct” to the adjective in a way we would never say today, such as this beauty from 1860, “The crepuscular realm of the writer’s own reveries.”

For animals, the word makes sense; creatures that bet their lives upon not being spotted by predators going on two legs, four, or a set of wings need to do their foraging in dim light.

I like the word because of its “mouthfeel”: it creeps over the tongue like a critter in tall grass, slinking about for an unearned meal. As with similar words, we have a Latin ancestor, crepusculum. The verb and noun “creep,” however, come from much further north; there’s Anglo-Saxon ancestry there.  By accident both words could be used for similar situations, with an unknown animal creeping around on its crepuscular rounds, at least until the patient farmer or fox spots it.

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! Scruples

Here comes a word we often hear but rarely think about when we use it. When I think of “scruples,” I have always imagined someone like Dame Maggie Smith’s character from Downton Abbey, who had more scruples than teacups.

Griffin Trau nominated our word; he graduated in December, double majoring in Leadership and International Studies. Since then, he has enrolled in UR’s Master of Liberal Arts program and has one more year of eligibility on our Football team. According to Griffin, “This one is interesting for its root in Latin scrupus meaning ‘small pebble,’ or more figuratively ‘anxiety.’ The word is sometimes used in its historic sense in landscaping for the small pebbles used in driveways, paths, or buffer zones…you know, the ones that always end up in your shoes (that might be how the Romans came up with anxiety).”

In 2009, I walked the remains of a Roman road in Yorkshire, and it would make me anxious to think of little rocks in my sandals with miles to go to reach the next vicus or oppidum. In fact, my reading tells me that Roman roads were amazingly maintained. I’d doubt too many scruples vexed travelers.  Yet travelers today take their scruples with them, such as refusing to eat certain foreign foods or, in a gaff I long ago made in a pub, tipping where a local culture does not accept gratuities.

How we went from pebbles to moral or ethical sensibility is anyone’s guess. OED Online gives a first use as a noun, meaning a very small unit of measurement, from 1382.  That appears to have been lost, as well as its use as a verb. In that case The OED traces it to 1627, meaning to hesitate based on a moral or ethical principle. It also had a broader meaning to hesitate or doubt, usage that seems to have faded completely today. A fleeting adjectival usage appears as well, scrupling. Let’s not descend further into this as it would be, at best, a scrupling pursuit.

Proper usage today would be as follows, “She was a Countess from a well regarded English family, and she had many scruples about who should be admitted to her inner circle of associates.”Another native of England, Alfred Hitchcock, noted that “There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever.”

A less morally fraught use would involve paying attention to detail, as with “After someone broke into his unlocked car, John became scrupulous about making sure he locked the car doors every night.”

Think of the two words we still associate with this Latinate antiquity: scrupulous and its shiftless sibling, unscrupulous. For the verb, I would scruple to use it in a modern sentence. That’s a pity. “Scruple” has a rich history and losing its verbal form robs the language of richness, since it adds a moral sense to our hesitation or anxiety.

That said, I am no scrupulous guardian of the past. Changes to our language as often enrich as impoverish. Yet I have scruples about many words we lose, for with them a scruple of nuance can vanish; it is the greatest thing I fear as our language changes.

See all of our Words of the Week here.

Word of the Week! Cyclopean

Welcome to a new feature at the Writing Center’s site. I (or a guest) will provide a new word regularly with some etymology as well as clarity about how to use it. When the word came not from my head but from our students, faculty, or staff, they will be recognized.

Our word of the week is “Cyclopean.” Thanks to student Haley Lawrence for providing it last semester in my Eng. 215 class, when we read the works of Howard Philips Lovecraft. Here’s a typically long-winded Lovecraftian example of the adjective:

“Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.”

The usage is from the story “The Call of Cthulhu,” and here it suggests buildings not only large, but inhumanly so, to the point of discomfort. So why the image of Ray Harryhausen’s  famous cyclops from the 1958 film Seventh Voyage of Sinbad?

A search through a few dictionaries shows a first recorded use in 1641 (OED Online). In that instance, humans shook in awe before “the Cyclopean power that which [sic] is the glory of Christ.”  The Christian savior qualifies as more than human, but the idea of a Cyclops, a one-eyed giant, seems lost here.  The OED also records a later usage for a telescope, certainly a one-eyed and powerful tool. That’s closer to that mythical creature who terrorized Odysseus until the wily Greek outwitted him.

The Cyclops of the epic poem was large, smart, and crafty in many ways. He was, most importantly, a rather domestic monster, keeping a herd of sheep and living in a large cave. I suppose the myth of the race of Cyclops led to all sorts of explanations for natural or ancient stonework as well as metaphors for contemporary architecture.

In Lovecraft’s prose, the term applies to large masonry of a sort that no human of his age might erect: blocks of Egyptian pyramids, The Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, and so forth.  Do not simply substitute “cyclopean” for “huge”: something must be huge to the point of inspiring awe. I’d call The Empire State Building or Hoover Dam Cyclopean; a McMansion or highway bridge, not so much. Imagine, 2,000 years hence, an archeologist writing “old New York staggers the explorer with the Cyclopean ruins of Midtown.”

My first print dictionary, a nearly antique Webster’s New Collegiate, adds another twist beyond one-eyed or large:  encyclopedia. The older term “cyclopedia” is a synonym for our familiar printed or online repository of information. It too is vast; think of what we mean when we say that someone has “encyclopedic knowledge” of a subject. One rarely sees printed encyclopedias any more, but if you spot one, consider how much shelf-space it takes and think of those one-eyed, inhuman giants of mythology.

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

 

And The Students Stop Blogging?

At the very time that I feel most comfortable teaching with blogs, I read that blogging is on the decline among the very demographic I teach.

I like Twitter and other sites for short notices, but few ideas can be expressed in 140 characters. Perhaps “the unexamined life is not worth living” by Socrates would fit in a Tweet. The Apology would not.

As usual, I’ll blame what I call a life of constant interruption. My Neo-Luddite side, and it is a prominent side, finds some cold comfort in the warnings of writers and thinkers such as Nicholas Carr, Mark Edmundson, and Sven Birkerts. Even tech-savvy Sherry Turkle’s book, Alone Together, warns of the shallowness of our “social” networking habits.

I look out for such writing, so I quickly ran across Gregory Palmerino’s article, “Teaching Bartleby to Write,” in the January 2011 issue of College English. Palmerino writes of his “students who would prefer not to remember to hand in writing because of their complex and distractable lives.”  Such students rarely linger in my classes after the add/drop period; the writing is plain on the syllabus about the consequences of Bartleby’s passive-aggressive preference of preferring not to do.

While I do find a kindred spirit in Palmerino, I part ways with his resistance to new technologies in the writing classroom. Blogging provides one excellent example of a type of writing that demands focus. Distraction here, in a post, can be as fatal as it would be in a short story or analytical essay.  So far, however, none of my students Tweet or use Facebook status-updates for any sort of serious discourse.  I doubt they ever will.

In print and online, we who cherish nuance and complexity in language need do something. Rejecting the new is not the answer.  So for now, my students, at least, will keep posting to blogs and replying to each other.