metaphor – Richmond Writing

Metaphor of the Month! Level Up

A feature story I spotted in the lifestyle section of a major news outlet mentioned “leveling up” the reader’s cooking skills.

What a strange world of ours. A niche hobby for geeks in the 70s and 80s, when I discovered it, has become so mainstream that it gives us a term for self improvment.

The tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons probably needs little introduction. Just in case, however, you can read the history of Gygax and Arneson’s brainchild. Some basics: players create a character in a fictional world of fantasy (usually a sword & sorcery Conan or high-fantasy Middle Earth setting) who begins as a novice thief, warrior, cleric, mage, or other profession. The characters who survive their adventures, moderated by a Game Master (GM) with rules and multi-sided polyhedral dice, gain “levels” of experience.

Perhaps played over many years or even decades of real life, a well-crafted “campaign” of adventures becomes an act of collaborative storytelling.

I never liked the D&D game system, since poor gameplay might boil down to “I am Sir Hardhelm, a 15th level Fighter! You’ll never defeat me!” I prefer systems where one does not wear one’s abilities and personalities, so to speak, on robes or shield. Yet the idea of “leveling up” is now everywhere in print. It has become a cliche. I see it in corporate literature, news stories, and feature pieces even in Atlantic. Nary an Elf or Orc to be seen.

I no longer play D&D, though I do enjoy other simpler, less-binary rules for science-fiction or fantasy settings, such as Savage Worlds, promising “fast, furious, and fun!” gaming. It uses those dice plus playing cards to introduce randomness I found missing in D&D, even 40+ years ago in college. Nearly every week, my team of players, both old-time D&Ders with graduate degrees, outsmart me, their GM, during our two-hour Nerd Night.

Despite my distaste for D&D’s system, we must give the game its due; it gave birth to many other games and rules systems, including my favorite that lacks levels or alignments of personalities. D&D’s moral alignments too are close to becoming cliches. You can see D&D’s nine pigeonholes on this chart, a Creative-Commons image from Hogan Hayes’ Blog “How We Argue.” Many versions can be found with a simple search, but any chart with Mal Reynolds from Firefly makes my personal cut.

In our real world, no human I’ve met fits these templates neatly. Some come close, but I prefer to think of us as a stew of good and bad character traits. Savage Worlds builds that into character development, so you could have, for instance, an evil starship captain I created as a non-player character in the far future: he collects artwork without stealing it and adores playing the cello. He will spare and even aid others, including enemies, who share his joy when hearing or performing classical music. Otherwise, you might end up being tossed out an airlock without your space suit, just for giggles.

I’m pleased, in a way, that my many hours of time spent playing role-playing games has been vindicated by the masses. Celebrities play D&D during YouTube videos.

I like not only embracing parts of geekdom but also seeing them emerge as a key elements of pop culture. Gaming with other humans, as compared to playing video games, was (and remains) for me a fun hobby when indulged in moderation.

Yet all those years of playing D&D taught me a thing or two about…when to stop (X-Files reference for the truly geeky). We all know youngsters who didn’t and squandered personal relationships, GPAs, and job opportunities to the allure of rolling those polyhedra dice and acting melodramatic while speaking in strange accents such as “You again, Looftar the Lord of the Stinking Horde? Begone, vile jelly! Unhand the fair Elven Princess Willowand! Verily, begone, I say!”

No, I never said that. Well, not exactly. May you always make your saving throws this Spring!

Help me to level up this blog with new words and metaphors. Send them my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to be GM for a week and write a guest entry? Let me know!

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

Images: Dice from Wikipedia, bottom image from my collection of old D&D stuff.

Word of the Week! Aperitif

in flight snack and drink

Reader Michael Stern, who describes himself as “a card-carrying student in the School of Professional and Continuing Studies” and a lifelong learner, nominated this week’s word. He’d seen it used in a novel way in a university announcement and asked if it might make a good word to discuss. I agree!

Our word is modern, with the first recorded borrowing from French in the 1890s. Michael’s sense of the term is correct: an aperitif is an alcoholic drink taken before dinner to stimulate appetite.

Though it’s not a traditional aperitif, a gin Martini is part of nearly every pre-dinner ritual for me. More than one drink like that makes me useless to the world, so “one and done” as we prepare food (I love to cook). Often we imbibe our drink with a small appetizer, which serves a very different purpose from an aperitif.

The appetizer takes the edge off one’s hunger, whereas the aperitif helps provoke appetite. You’ll find a list of traditional aperitifs here, including a vermouth I often use in my very traditional Martinis. Recipe follows:

1/3 Vermouth,
2/3 gin,
dash of bitters,
shaken with very small ice cubes; shaker and glasses and all ingredients cold,
Twist of lemon in warm weather, olive–never olive juice!–in winter).

According to the site noted in the last paragraph, “let the flavors of Noilly Prat Extra Dry Vermouth transport you to a world of sophistication.” This captures my sense of an aperitif; it’s for sipping sociably, not guzzling, chugging, shooting, etc. That’s juvenile drinking and a nasty habit to be left behind after college.

Back to our word: if something whets your taste for more, it can be, metaphorically, an aperitif. If it numbs that taste, it’s not.

Drink and eat responsibly this winter!

The blog will continue during exam week, with a final metaphor for 2025, then go on hiatus until the new year.

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: Appetizer and aperitif,”ANA SFO to NRT Business Class Inflight Meal” by Jun Seita, Flikr

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

Metaphor of the Month! Data Scraping

As I prepare for my Fall class, “Writing With and About AI,” as well as a book proposal on AI in the writing classroom, I keep encountering neologisms like this month’s metaphor.

What do “scrapers” do? They can, according to a firm that employs them, “browse sites based on your keyword inputs or connections to your website or social media accounts. They can also skim through online reviews, product descriptions, and other categories.” That sounds benign enough, as sites like this one lie behind no pay-walls (there’s a neologism to which I’ll return in some future post). The practice, according to the Wikipedia entry, appears to date to the 1980s, before we had The Web or household Internet.

Why scrape data to train AI? From the firm quoted in the previous paragraph, data scrapers assist in “automating outreach, [and] they can also help during the early company development and research phases. Even later on, you can use them to monitor online chatter and brand perception.” As I tell my students constantly, they need to learn how to use these AI-based tools, even if they dislike them. Getting a job will depend upon AI-fluency.

And yet as I write this, the BBC has threatened to take the AI firm Perplexity to court for unauthorized scraping of its data and “reproducing BBC content ‘verbatim’ without its permission.” This use of BBC content, though free, poses a new problem for me, a self-professed “Copy Leftist” who has long opposed copyright save for creative work.

Open-access scholarship, my own syllabi, and more in The Creative Commons are there to be scraped. The problem for me involves my and other creators’ words being used without any asking or attribution; this use violates the ethos of the Creative Commons. 20 years ago, I wrote to a Hong-Kong firm that had used our online handbook pages, verbatim, without acknowledgement. I told them I’d be contacting every e-list I knew to show that they had done this. They relented and gave our creators credit. I gave them my blessing to use our content under that one condition.

I’ve long advocated having everything save classified government information and creative work given away, free. That was one promise of the original Internet. Just cite it if you scrape it. I dislike copyright for other materials intensely.

Now I’m thinking that Web-crawlers and other bots that scrape data pose an even larger problem than copyright laws and pay walls. We may need to revise copyright laws to require attribution even for Creative-Commons work, or to watermark all AI-scraped content.

Scrape the barrel for new words and metaphors, then send them to me at 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 lab.howie.tw

Word of the Week! Picayune

Cigarette paper wrapper I love this word. I love the idea that New Orleans named a newspaper after it. There’s a Mississippi town called Picayune that I should visit, and of course I love it that Mark Twain / Sam Clemens used the word and has also been skewered with it. In this recent example in The Atlantic by Graeme Wood, he describes a new biography focusing on Clemens’ difficult personal life and financial disasters thus: “His credulity led to misadventures the details of which are so picayune that Chernow’s emphasis on them can be maddening.” No detail about Clemens’ life can be maddening to me: I immediately ordered a copy of Chernow’s giant biography, Mark Twain.

What makes something picayune? We have an answer! The OED notes a French / Occitan etymology but Southern US origin with an 1806 first recorded use, “One can’t buy anything [at New Orleans] for less than a six cent piece, called a picayune.” Over time, the term morphed from a small amount of money to a trifling amount to a worthless person. Thus it became a metaphor for things or people of no value.

We can name many such persons, some with considerable influence (I don’t care for influences nor do I wish to be one). In any case, despite the rise of many picayune people and pastimes, our word continues a gradual decline in usage.

Send words and metaphors my way 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: though blocked by the picayune I.T. rules on campus, I managed to outsmart them and got this form cigarettecollector.net. I dislike cigs, but not cigars. They will yank my final stogie from my tobacco-stained, dead lips.

Metaphor of the Month! Burner Phone

Many pleasure-travelers are opting for a burner phone this year, a generic prepaid device that does. not contain their personal information. So are many corporate and governmental employees traveling to surveillance states like China.

But where did the idea of a phone we might burn up when done come from? The OED dates the term back to 1996 as first usage, the era of my first phone, a flip-phone called a TracPhone. The Rap lyrics are so dirty I can’t quote them here. But suffice to say, the brains at The OED found this first usage.

We already have what I would call “burner cars” (in the Upper Midwest, they are called Winter Beaters) and “burner clothes” (tragically unsustainable fast-fashion clothing). I suppose some readers may even have “burner friends.” Don’t tell me.

I have an inkling that we’ll be using the adjective “burner” in many more new metaphors in the times to come. Frequency of use for our metaphor continues to rise on a steady slope.

TracPhone is still around. I’ll get one for my next international trip. I’ll only want basic browsing, texts, voice, and the ability to take photos. I don’t use much social media with on the road.

Given reports of Americans’ social-media histories being demanded when they re-enter the US, I’m taking a “burner phone” to Canada next year. Frankly, my Constitutionally protected speech is none of TSA’s or Customs and Enforcement’s darned business, unless I advocate something illegal. And I don’t do that.

Safe travels.

Send me words and metaphors that express your freedom of speech by emailing 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 Adrian Clark at Flickr.

Metaphor of the Month! Rugged Individualism

Let’s begin with a lesson I teach students: check your sources.

Wikipedia provides a dubious first coinage for this month’s metaphor, citing President Herbert Hoover. Yet the OED goes earlier, to 1897 and this use by J.G. Rogers, “The stern and rugged individualism which finds no charm in the fellowship of kindred souls.” That said, Hoover may have popularized this term in the American mind.

Flawed origin-story and all, you can read about the history of our metaphor at Wikipedia’s page. Though the concept may inspire a great deal of libertarian philosophy, usage peaked in 1950 and has slowly fallen off since, as shown on the OED’s frequency chart.

Born of our nation’s frontier roots, the metaphor implies that the most resourceful people always provide for themselves. On a frontier, they often had to endure hardships, though the history we receive oversimplifies trading posts and other early means for European settlers to survive in a harsh landscape. Even Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, our quintessential rugged individuals, did not make their own rifles and gunpowder, no matter how many alligators and bears they wrestled or rivers they jumped across in one bound. See the decent, if uneven, film The Alamo for a re-assessment of Crockett’s life. The famous frontiersman comes across as a charismatic man trapped by his own self-made mythology.

While the term may have declined, its principles continue to inform contemporary political debates. We hear related terms such as “bootstrapping,” to pull oneself up from poverty to prosperity, despite obstacles.

It escapes me how a frontier concept, at the core of so much political discourse, works in an interconnected, urbanized nation. I suppose some of the origin of our metaphor comes from Emerson’s influential essay “Self Reliance,” which you can read here. When read carefully, Emerson does not imply that we are islands, nor his he talking about bear-hunting. Instead, he focuses on our inner lives, where solitude and self-knowledge make a person stronger but where being overly social distracts one from that goal. Think of Thoreau at Walden (yes, his mom baked pies for him).

I agree, yet nowhere in Emerson do I detect a survival-of-the-fittest mentality that underlies so much of the Rugged Individualist concept.

I farm and DIY a lot of things that urban and suburban folks cannot, yet I laugh at both this concept as well as the findings of 2016 Pew Research poll reported in the Wikipedia entry, that “57% of Americans did not believe that success in life was determined by forces outside of their control.”

One wonders how many of them have been subjected to natural disasters, layoffs not their doing, random accidents, or medical emergencies. So much lies beyond our control; As Emperor Marcus Aurelius contends in his Meditations many times, we can only control ourselves. See my entry on Stoic. May you be stoic in the face of things you cannot change.

Send bears to wrestle, as well as words and metaphors to jessid-at-richmond-edu or by leaving a comment below.

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

Metaphor of the Month! Mother Nature

You may be old enough to recall a Chiffon Margarine advertising campaign featuring a woman dressed like an Earth-deity and the motto “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”

I agree, though margarine never fooled me. I love cooking so bring on the butter, lard (for pie crusts), avocado oil, and olive oil. Otherwise, get out of my kitchen.

So where did the phrase Mother Nature come from? When was it first coined? The OED is wonky today, giving lots of page errors, but I detect two entries, with one giving a first recorded use of 1390. That means three years before the birth of Gutenberg, so it merits some attention. The problem with this usage, from Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale, comes from the lack of “Mother.” The teller does relate nature to a female deity, but that association goes back to a time not simply before printing but before writing itself.

The same entry gives a date of 1500 for “Dame Nature,” so we clearly see a pattern emerging. Not until 1962 does the OED replace “Dame,” perhaps from midcentury US usage as a belittling term for women, with “Mother.”

The second entry in the OED helps a great deal with our etymology, with instances of “mother nature,” without capital letters, reaching back to 1525.

As for Chiffon? The current owner of the brand discontinued US and Canadian distribution back in 2002, as Wikipedia informs me. Mother Nature had the last laugh. While I don’t think we have an actual angry goddess lashing out at puny homo sapiens who do so much harm to our ecosystems, pause a moment to pay some respect. With a real winter this year (which I love) it could seem that Mama ain’t happy with us. Or is it Papa? Old Man Winter is another metaphor worth our while (and for next year).

Meanwhile sit back, slow down, stay home if you can, enjoy the quiet ferocity of a snow-storm. It’s not nice to fool around with Old Man Winter, either.

If you think of any words or metaphors to share with the community in 2025, send them to me at jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu or by leaving a comment below.

That call for content includes updates and corrections. Regular reader Michael Stern gives us some clarity on our recent word of the week, inure:

“I have been a practicing attorney for more than fifty years and I have never seen the word inure spelled ‘enure.’ If I ever did, I probably would have thought it to be a spelling error.”

Excellent feedback. I always welcome it!

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

Metaphor of the Month! Spinster

I had the good fortune to spend a few days in Colonial Williamsburg, where I wandered into the shop for weaving and spinning. The interpreter on duty explained, while carding and spinning wool, how automated Spinning Jennies replaced the cottage-industry spinning wheels, leading to lots of superfluous spinsters.

And thus we continue my post-retirement exploration of words associated with old folks.

Her story got my ears buzzing; I explained about this blog and wondered how the term came to be associated with older, never-married women who also may have never spun yarn. The interpreter didn’t know for certain, but she hazarded a guess that the number of unemployed spinsters in the late 18th century led to the term being used generally for women who were seen as of little use socially. That possibility would follow a long history of legal use. The OED entry notes how in English Common Law “Use of the occupational term to indicate a woman’s marital status appears to have been motivated by the fact that many unmarried women and girls were employed in spinning,”

This makes sense; a spinsters’ hours during six-day working weeks were quite long; we were told that it took 12 women working at wheels to supply a single loom. Would they have time to marry?

In the etymology of out word, one of the longest I’ve encountered so far at the OED, The writers complicate matters. They indicate that “spinster is applied in a number of legal and official documents of the late 16th and 17th centuries to women who are also described as wives and appear to be of high social rank.” Whatever the tangled skein (there’s another metaphor) of history here, when did the shift to an older woman occur?

By the early 18th Century, a word with a somewhat murky legal meaning had taken on a negative connotation, as an unmarried woman “who has remained single beyond the typical age for marriage, often stereotypically characterized as prim and fussy or as lonely, childless, and resentful.”

There the meaning has remained, for 200 years. The word appears rarely today, its frequency of use in steady decline since 1950. The term is considered offensive; rightly so, but the drift of meaning from profession to insult does fascinate.

We may never know why this shift to an insulting meaning occurred. Today, on the other hand, we occasionally hear of press secretaries or PR folks called “spinsters,” who try to put a positive spin upon otherwise bad news.

If you think of any words or metaphors to share with the community in 2025, send them to me at jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu or by leaving a comment below.

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

Image of Spinning Jenny courtesy of Wikipedia

Metaphor of the Month! Swan Song

I’ve been asked by a number of readers whether this blog is about to shut down, as I retire. Short answer: I hope not!

First, I am pleasantly surprised, even mildly astonished, that so many of you read this blog weekly. Second, I plan to continue the blog as long as the University will have me. I resume part-time teaching next term as a faculty member in our School of Professional and Continuing Studies, whose faculty and students have nominated more than a few words and metaphors here over the years. My research on student use of AI and its effect on writing instruction will continue as well, and I’m certain we’ll have new terms from the burgeoning new technology.

At least for now, this post is not my swan song. It’s a curious metaphor I first encountered when a head-banging teen who loved (Living! Loving!) Led Zeppelin. Their record label was Swan Song, and even then I knew that the metaphor signified a final act. It’s been a long time since my last reading of Plato’s Phaedo, but as Wikipedia reminds us, in it Socrates “says that, although swans sing in early life, they do not do so as beautifully as before they die.” Others in Antiquity and after carried that torch (there’s another metaphor!).

It surprises me that this month’s metaphor has endured so long without interruption or corruption; it can be found on the lips of those who never read Plato. Incidentally, I saw many swans (and adorably fluffy cygnets) in Limerick Ireland this year, but none were singing and I’m happy to report that none died, at least while I was watching them.

I suppose the beauty of the bird and the poignancy of the metaphor keep it vital. We end up with a final act both tragic and lovely, one very different from the metaphor of the black swan I covered four long years ago, at the very start of the pandemic that altered our lives so profoundly. My own heart had been broken four years earlier, when my favorite musician (sorry Led Zep) David Bowie released his album Blackstar on his birthday, just two days before he died. It was a deliberate act, and press accounts rightly called this important final artistic statement a Swan Song.

That’s eight years and two very different swans. How quickly they glide by! What will the next eight bring? If I’m still here and there’s interest, I’m certain we will not run out of words or metaphors.

Throughout the holidays and into 2025 this blog will continue, so send words and metaphors, seasonal or not, to me at jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu or by leaving a comment below. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image Source: The Singing Swan (1655) by Reinier van Persijn, courtesy of Wikipedia.