metaphor – Richmond Writing

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.

Metaphor of the Month! Cold War

This old veteran, who served from the late 1940s through the early 90s, recently returned to active duty in news reports about Russia, the US, and China. So I got curious about who first drafted him as a metaphor.

One can find uses of the term from as early as the 19th Century, but in the modern sense, it refers to the mostly nonviolent arms race and nuclear standoff between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. Politico has Bernard Baruch stating it in 1947, but I think that George Orwell beat him to the punch. Though Baruch may have popularized the term, Wikipedia has the matter correct here. In a 1945 first-cited reference given by the OED, Orwell wrote in “You and the Atomic Bomb,” of a “permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours.” And it seemed permanent to us in the 60s and 70s. We could not recall a time of friendship with the USSR or the nation we called “Red China.”

I grew up under the shadow of the Berlin Wall and the mushroom cloud, as I recently told a student anxious about a possible nuclear exchange over the war in Ukraine. Sometimes memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall seem distant, in this new era of major-power tensions.

Then our President at the G20 summit, in a move utterly at odds with his showboating, clownish predecessor, met China’s leader for serious talks. Xi and Biden discussed very sensitive issues, including Taiwan, and our President declared that no new Cold War has begun.

That may be cold comfort to my student, but having lived 30 years with the standoff between the US and Soviet superpowers, I wanted to give some reassurance that sanity prevailed then. May it again. I end with two images: a 1960s interception of a Soviet nuclear bomber by an Air Force F-102, then one that just occurred with a modern US F-22 jet tagging along, a mere 8 miles from US airspace.

Some things change more slowly than our language. Students, if you are reading this, I recommend that you take a few classes about that fraught era.

As things do change, if you have words that have changed, words that have not, or interesting metaphors, send to them in by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia.

Metaphor of the Month! Pollyanna

Today I told my class that while I’ve been called “bumptious” (irritating and conceited, and a former word of the week) I’ve never been called a Pollyanna.

Who was this person? The OED has her as the brainchild of American children’s author Eleanor Hodgman Porter (1868–1920). Pollyanna was a relentlessly and often naively cheerful character. I’d call that sort of person “perky,” and they irritate me to no end, being a bit of a grump (I was chosen to be Scrooge in our 6th Grade Christmas play).

The OED has our word not appearing very often in modern speech, and that’s a pity. Students may encounter our metaphor in the contexts of Political Science, Leadership, History, Journalism, or Literature on our campus. I don’t know anyone who reads Porter’s works these days, but we have Pollyannas aplenty. From the OED, a 2003 example: “Although the authors conclude that ecological sustainability is slowly gaining ground, they are no pollyannas.”

Read a fine piece from Atlantic Monthly, “How We All Become Pollyannas (and Why We Should Be Glad About It)” for a nuanced look at the fictional character. She turns out not as irritating as we might believe, though Ruth Graham does note how “When she gasps in rapture upon being sent to her room to read a pamphlet about houseflies and hygiene, it’s impossible not to roll your eyes.” Despite that moment, Pollyanna fought off gloom by working to be happy.

That’s a good lesson for everyone. Now all you Pollyannas, Negative Nellies (and Neds), Bumptious Bobs, and other malcontents or perky folk, I need your words and metaphors for this blog.

Send them to me by e-mail (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.

“Large Vinyl Pollyanna Doll” courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Scrofulous

Some background here, ye corky-armed poltroons: I be playin’ a game with some academic friends that involves pirate ships and sailing. It’s great fun: one can design a ship, navy or pirate, and learn to tack, raise and lower sails, fire cannon with several types of shot, and (of course) be sunk down to Davy Jones’ locker.

Sea-faring has a rich vocabulary, some of which in time entered academic parlance and common use (“against the wind” comes to mind).

Likewise, nicknames with adjectives yield some excellent (cannon) fodder for this blog.

Recently several of us, between battles on the virtual sea, devised alliterative pirate names.

“Pestilential Pete” proved a fine one. “Scurvy” gets overused and can be easily solved by citrus on a ship (hence, the clever English who figured this out got called Limeys).

But what about “Scrofulous Sam”? That was my pick. It’s not because our pirate suffers from the lymphatic disease called Scrofula, though that is the origin of our word this week, as the OED shows us. Nay, Matey, belay that thought!

Sam would more likely (he is a pirate) to suffer from a moral depravity. As the OED entry notes, Sam would be “morally corrupt.” Never confuse the word with “scruffy,” of similar antiquity but denoting physical shabbiness.

While first usage of this week’s term dates back to the 17th Century, it was only in the Victorian era that we see a first-use metaphorically, in relation to morals. An 1889 example shows how the term appears in print, and readers today are likely to encounter it in Victorian literature like this:

“Holywell-street was re-named ‘Booksellers’-row’ because of its scrofulous reputation.”

A nasty word, but formal-sounding at this distance in time, as is “pestilential” or even “barbarous.” Drawing-room dialogue in Downton Abbey, the characters never fearing the eruption of pirates, plague-victims, or Visigoths during tea hour.

At least until the next sequel. Avast!

Be thou lubber or old salt, a tar or a pantaloon, scrofulous or saintly, this blog be keepin’ a weather-eye out for new words and metaphors! Sam will take your messages in a bottle at jessid-at-richmond-dot-edu

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

Flag image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Metaphor of the Month! Horse Latitudes

Every summer, I read something nautical. I’m a mountain and not a water person, but sailing and ships really interest me. The closest I get is from my fishing kayak (and this has been a good fishing year for me). Four years have passed (!) since I did my last nautical metaphor, doldrum.

Part of my interest in ships and sailing involves the riches of vocabulary they bring us. In several books I encountered our rather antique metaphor, another of those terms I’d love to see used more commonly again. As the OED informs us, the term refers to a “belt of calms and light airs which borders the northern edge of the N.E. trade-winds.” Usually the term simply indicates the literal area, even in our time of steam-ships.

The origin of the term remains unknown to the OED editors. The tales of sailors lightening their load by throwing effigies or actual horses overboard seems a stretch to this landlubber, given the animals’ value. Eating them when becalmed and starving? Possibly, according to a writer at Medium.

Metaphorically, our term suits June and early July well for academics. We are deep in our summer projects, and campus is silent of most student noise. Sometimes we have little bursts of activity; the winds pick up, so to speak. In that area of calm between steady winds, Facilities repairs and builds, plans for the year are laid down. It’s my favorite time of year, even though most summer weeks I work from home.

This summer’s read? Sopranino by Patrick Ellam and Colin Mudie. They designed and sailed the world’s smallest ship–a 19′ sailboat rated for ocean travel–across the Atlantic. It’s a great story told in a light, yes, breezy style from a simpler time than ours. They do run into several sudden calms off South America, in the horse latitudes. They also get robbed in Jamaica, but being charmers, content the crooks with a few dollars. The books remains out of print but old copies are easy to find.

As Summer skims along like a fast racing yacht, I’ll post your entries. Do you have a word or metaphor for this blog? Send them to me by e-mail (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 from the 2011 edition.

Word of the Week! Sybaritic

Theatre of Sybaris

Here’s a term (a metaphor, really) that I misunderstood. For the longest time, I believed that it implied sensual decadence, the sort we might associate with gluttons and pornographers. In other words, hedonism.

Wrong. Though excess is possible for sybarites, my guide to a more nuanced meaning of our word comes from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s excellent, three-volume account of a walk he took from The Hook of Holland to Constantinople. I’ve finished volumes one and two, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and The Water. Simply put, Leigh Fermor proved himself one of the finest travel writers of the 20th Century, among other things all starting with the letter P: polymath, prodigy for languages, patriot. You’d do well to pick up his books.

And yes, he was a sybarite who enjoyed drinking, art, natural scenery, and beautiful women. No wonder James Bond and Indiana Jones are said to have a bit of Fermor in them.

As a commando in the Second World War, his fluency in both German and Cretan Greek was so prodigious (another P) that he led a team of commandos disguised as German officers who captured Major General Heinrich Kreipe. While waiting for a boat to Egypt, Fermor and Kriepe sat in a cave, passing the time by smoking cigarettes and spouting lines of verse at each other in ancient Greek.

But like the man himself, I digress. Fermor’s digressions go on for pages, but they entertain. I’m not sure that a dissertation on Sybaris, an ancient Greek city in southern Italy “noted for its effeminacy and luxury” in the words of the OED entry, would prove even a shadow of Fermor’s words.

We today recoil at the use of “effeminate” in a pejorative, even misogynistic sense. In Fermor’s reckoning, however, anyone can enjoy good food, drink, art, or the company of witty, beautiful people. I remain uncertain about how the prosperous Greek city came to be associated with decadent enjoyment. Jealousy, perhaps, of the wine cellars and good life to be had in Sybaris? I’d prefer life there to, say, Sparta. Both cities are curious ruins today: perhaps that too is a warning about the virtues of moderation?

Yet forget moralizing and think luxurious thoughts for April, perhaps our most sybaritic month of all.

Do you have a word or metaphor for this blog? Send them to me by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

Metaphor of the Month! Tomfoolery

Fool's Cap

In what seems now ancient history in the year 2019, I covered the metaphor of an April Fool. It is April Fool’s Day as I write this, so I sought about for another foolish word.

So who was Tom? A generic name, equivalent to our “Joe Blow” or “John Q. Citizen,” if we are to believe the etymology given by Merriam-Webster’s Online site. This origin gets repeated by sources found with Google. Thome would have been foolish indeed for his example to endure many centuries. Admittedly, we do still call miserly folks “Scrooges,” but we have Uncle Ebenezer (I played him in our 6th Grade Christmas play) to remind us of Dickens’s original humbugler.

As usual, I sought out the OED for clarity and authority on this matter. Thome Fole was English, right?

Yes indeed. Tom was a common name in Medieval England, and as the OED explains, the earliest recorded examples from the 14th Century likely refer to specific jesters named Tom. I’m reminded of a later Tom, “Poor Tom,” the madman Edgar feigns to be from King Lear. Later, the term simply became generic, with the older spelling “fole,” from the Anglo-Norman foole, becoming our “fool.” And there we have it.

Who else from myth or history has a name that became metaphor? Tyrants, certainly, and dictators. Think of all the “Little Hitlers” since 1945. Consider the many Lincolns who have freed people and scores of Cassandras trying to warn us (though we fools do not listen).

Send words and metaphors, wise or foolish, to me by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Metaphor of the Month! Pyrrhic Victory

We have, for the first time since the 1990s, a European war on. In fact, we have the first since 1945, if one considers the tragedy in the Balkans, after the breakup of Yugoslavia, to be a civil war.

If President Putin triumphs, however, it appears that his victory will be pyrrhic. That metaphor has a long, interesting history but also, as descriptor, it reveals a long past of human suffering.

The adjective pyrrhic denotes an ancient Greek war-dance. Check that etymology at the OED link. In this sense, the term has no related to King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who won a battle against the Romans but at a terrible cost in irreplaceable manpower. Recent examples might include some of Japan’s early victories in World War II. Their navy, in particular, lost aviators who had been some of the best in the world, in 1941. They never replaced them properly, with horrible consequences for their military and civilian population.

Wikipedia lists other examples. The term enjoys use beyond military history; any contest where the winner comes out weaker could be labeled a Pyrrhic Victory. Consider this example from 1998, in the OED entry on pyrrhic as adjective:

For the Chancellor who has been running Germany for 16 years, pushing through the euro could be pyrrhic.

That entry also has a great deal about our metaphor, including a first usage in the 17th Century.

Any victory that the Russian President and his circle of minions achieve may be added to the list of nation-breaking victories. I’d prefer peace, with honor for Ukraine, and without more bloodshed. Right now, however, that prospect appears remote.

Do you have a word or metaphor for this blog? Send them to me by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

Image of Battle of Santa Cruz courtesy of Wikipedia.