metaphor – Page 3 – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Quagmire

This post is a tough one to make, as it comes on the heels of the Taliban victory in Afghanistan. I’ve heard our two-decade involvement in that nation called a “quagmire,” and often wondered where we got this word, so often used metaphorically.

We have lots of words for swampy ground: wetland, marsh, bog, fen, morass, mire. Some like “mire” have a negative connotation, implying getting stuck, sinking, drowning perhaps. My guess was that the “ag” ending implied a Scottish origin; the Morag is a monster from Loch Morar, after all: a less-famous version of Nessie. We have those “hags” of magical origin, too. And haggis. Don’t laugh, as it’s something I came to really like during my Scottish walking trip in 2014, to the point of eating it with all three meals one day.

A look at the OED entry parts the mists to reveal not a monster of Scottish origin or a broomstick-rider but a variant spelling from the 16th and 17th Centuries: wagmire. A “quag” is, however, a rarely used word for a marshy spot. It’s likely a regional English term, as is mire or “myre” in older spellings. That word came from Scandinavia in dragon-prowed longships.

Why we need quag and mire together? It’s rather like saying “Marshy swamp” or “boggy marsh.” Perhaps the intention was to imply how dangerous a particular wet place could be. We will never know: the answer sank in the quagmire long ago and has been obscured by the marshy mists of millennia (and really bad alliteration).

If you have words or metaphors to share, contact 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.

Bog image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Metaphor of the Month! Tolkienesque

Now that classes are about to resume on our decidedly Harry Potter campus, I’ve been reading the third of J.K. Rowling’s novels. I’m not a huge fan of the series, but it has been light summer fun.

It’s inevitable that Rowling gets contrasted, often unfairly, to work by an earlier British fantasist, J.R.R. Tolkien. We already have “Hogswartian” or “Potteresque” in the language, though I’d hoped to find “Rowlinsian.” The latter would be my preference, to honor her work and influence.

Old J.R.R. need not worry about adjectives named for him, though he now resides in what he would probably call “The Undying Lands.” The Oxford Don’s fiction generated an adjective that provides our Metaphor this month. I’ll think of it often as we get those golden hours at daybreak and dusk, once the weather breaks near the Autumnal Equinox. I associate “Tolkienesque” with glimpses of faraway mountains, groves of ancient trees, or the slanting golden light that always seems to be falling in Rivendell or Lothlorien, or perhaps on the walls of Minas Tirith, just before Sauron’s darkness descends for the awful battle there between good and evil.

You know a Tolkienesque landscape when you see it. I suppose a slag heap that reminds one of Mordor suffices, too, but usually, I hear the metaphor applied only to dreamy or ruggedly awe-inspiring places.

Tolkien’s friend and renowned fantasist C.S. Lewis beat us all to the punch, in 1950 no less, by calling something “Tolkienian,” a form now apparently falling out of use. By The OED’s reckoning, our spelling of the metaphor first appeared in 1970, about the time that the Counterculture’s fascination with Middle Earth blossomed into a cottage (or at least Hobbit-hole) industry that continues today, thanks to Peter Jackson’s films. Things Tolkienesque got spurred on by his tremendous LOTR trilogy and they survived his lamentable Hobbit films.

A few other writers, such as Virginia Woolf (Woolfian), H.P. Lovecraft (Lovecraftian), and J.G. Ballard (Ballardian) have been so honored. Shakespearean? Miltonian? These enjoy long and respected usage.

I hope your Fall semesters are as epic, if not as dangerous, as Frodo’s journey through Tolkienesque landscapes.

As always, please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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.

Tolkienesque landscape, Isle of Skye 2014, by the author

Metaphor of the Month! Compass Rose

Summer means a time for me to read a book about the sea. I’ve written about this habit before, a strange one for me, as I really dislike the US East Coast beaches south of Maine. Give me a rocky shore near mountains and deep blue water, please, not sandflies, crowds, and blistering heat.

On such a coast as I prefer, a compass rose would come in very handy for a mariner. It’s the often fanciful symbol of a compass on a map. In the image above, one is set in concrete. In each case, the image provides both reference and aesthetic pleasure.

I ran across this term in Nicholas Monsarrat’s 1951 novel The Cruel Sea, an often terrifying account of escort duty during The Battle of the Atlantic. The first ship crewed by many of the main characters is Compass Rose, and I began to wonder why a cartographer’s symbol that looks only faintly like a flower might have earned that honor.

At GISnet, Bill Thoen notes a 13th Century origin for the term, stemming from (pun intended) the resemblance the design to a rose. There was also a device called a “wind rose” for determining the direction of wind, “but the 32 points of the compass rose come from the directions of the eight major winds, the eight half-winds and the sixteen quarter-winds.”

I’m no sailor, so I’ve never heard of half or quarter-winds. Now I have. Thoen’s entry takes us further back than does the OED, which has an earliest recorded use of 1527, describing the symbol as “The roses of the windes or pointes of the compasse.” I like that notion of the roses of the wind, though soutwesterly winds in my part of the world are more like damp blankets. I prefer the west wind or a stiff northwesterly, thank you.

As metaphor, compass rose shares lots of floral company with a host of other similes and metaphors such as “fresh as a daisy,” a downcast “wallflower,” and Virginia Woolf’s famous (and often apt) comparison of academics to hothouse flowers.

May your gardens be full of flowers this summer. If you have any words or metaphors to add, contact me at jessid-at-richmond-dot-edu.

image: Compass rose in concrete;, Fort McHenry National Monument, Baltimore, MD, courtesy of Margaret W. Carruthers at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Monadnock

I have long enjoyed climbing Old Rag mountain near Madison, VA. It provided me with a then-new word, when someone called it a monadnock. Since summer hiking weather is here, let’s explore what, at first glance, seems a Native-American word.

Our word comes from Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, whose origin (thank you, Wikipedia) “Loosely translated. . .means ‘mountain that stands alone.’ ” Over time, that peak figuratively crossed the Atlantic, so alpinists all over the world refer to such lonely peaks as Monadnocks.

As metaphor, the word has real power. I’ve heard people of strong character called “mountains,” but the OED has an excellent example by W.H. Auden, in 1947, “O stiffly stand, a staid monadnock, On her peneplain.” Auden just gave me another word I’ve never encountered; a peneplain is a level area formed by erosion. The poet knew his geology, all the better to frame a monadnock.

Get out and climb a peak this summer (if you can beat the crowds, post-COVID). I’ll save Old Rag for the off-season.

The blog will continue occasionally all summer, but please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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 Fuji, one of the world’s most famous monadnocks, by Kawase Hasui.

Metaphor of the Month! Push the Envelope

As many of you may have, I first experienced this term in Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book The Right Stuff. As a fan of all things aerospace, I began labeling anything new as “pushing the envelope.”

Soon it became such a cliche for me that I stopped. Now, in my current First-Year Seminar, “The Space Race,” here I am again, pushing that metahpor into young minds.

First, to understand the term, let’s forget the type of envelope once used to mail bills and letters (remember them?). Instead, we must delve ito the realms of physics, math, and engineering.

A UK phrase finder site that I’m mightily glad to have found gives a nicely succinct and technical explanation of our envelope, but for our purposes, let’s stop at this definition from the OED, “to exceed or extend the boundaries of what is considered possible or permissible; to pioneer or innovate.” They provide a first recorded use in a 1970 aviation magazine, nearly a decade before Wolfe immortalized the term.

The boundaries, in the mathematic sense, are those set by the performance characteristics of normal flight in a particular type of aircraft. Go outside the envelope, and you won’t be flying…you will either push the envelope to a new place for that plane and others who fly it. Or, if you fail, you’ll be tumbling, spinning, breaking apart, crashing. Pilots prefer terms such as “inertial coupling” when talking to the rest of earthbound mortals. As Wolfe related, they might use “auger in” or “screw the pooch” when talking to each other, over a few rounds.

My favorite flying machine that pretty much pushed the envelope so far that its boundaries never fully were know? NASA’s X-15 rocket plane, a potential space vehicle that flew many times for research purposes but never got developed into an utterly cool and fully reusable spacecraft we might have had 20 years before the Space Shuttle. A fellow named Neil Armstrong was known for his journeys to the edge of space in one of them. Many X-15 pilots later earned Astronaut wings. Neil never went quite high enough for that, but he more than compensated on two later space missions, one involving a small step he took.

We can push the envelope in many ways today, but don’t push the envelope of cliche by overusing this one. It has escaped the realm of flight to auger into the earthbound realm of cubicle-land, becoming as “in the box” as the phrase for thinking outside it.

As always, please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing 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 the North American X-15 courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Harrowing

I have spent a lot of time with this word in its literal sense: the second stage of breaking soil after plowing it. Farmers turn to the disc harrow to break the large furrows created by a plow into smaller clods, closer to accepting seed.

What harrowing a field, for me at least, is a relaxing activity, in the term’s metaphorical sense it’s not so pleasant. And we live in harrowing times: a global pandemic, a contested election, an angry population.

The OED gives this sense of the term only brief mention. I’m surprised that the latest instance of the term in the sense of “That harrows or lacerates the feelings; acutely distressing or painful” dates from 1895. That’s precisely the power of this term: as the tractor’s harrow lacerates already torn soil, crushing and breaking it, so can the times harrow us.

We occasionally, in religious texts, run into this idea, from a different definition at the OED:

“The harrowing of hell was the triumphant expedition of Christ after his crucifixion, when he brought away the souls of the righteous who had..been held captive in hell since the beginning of the world.”

Without getting spiritual here, it’s a strange, rather antique sense of the term. I suppose it implies a sifting, just as physical harrowing removes roots and turns up what we want: the good soil, while burying weeds.

Send words and metaphors to jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

John Deere 2155 in the midst of harrowing a plowed field. Photo and tillage by author.

Word of the Week! Metonymy

Thanks to Sharon Condrey, Director of Tax Compliance and Payroll at UR, for nominating this one. I’d previously covered the term synecdoche, and our term this week seems similar, at least at first blush. My earlier pick could indicate something smaller representing something bigger, such as “boots on the ground” for an Army. That’s also the sense of our word this week.

Yet synecdoche can also mean something bigger representing something smaller, as in the rotten error too many students make: “Society will not accept that change,” when they really mean “A majority of voters at this point in our history, and living in one particular state, will not accept that change.” In my classes, such papers lose 10 of 100 points for each such error, and the writers have one week to remove the error for a regrade.

Not so with metonymy, a usage that rarely leads to sweeping generalization. As the OED notes, metonymy involves “substituting for a word or phrase denoting an object, action, institution, etc., a word or phrase denoting a property or something associated with it.” Thus “the gridiron” can be used to talk about the game of American football, or “the press” for print-based media outlets who now have Web pages, video streams, and more. Likewise, at the time of writing, we are still awaiting results from “the ballot box,” when voting these days appears in a variety of forms, many electronic.

I suppose that student writers might run into trouble with metonymy if overused. It could lead to lots of repetition if a writer talking about a conflict between a monarchy and parliament used “the crown” 12 times in a paper. “Synonyms are wonderful things, students,” I’ve been known to quip, “but using them well requires slowing down and giving a damn.”

Send words and metaphors to jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Creative-Commons image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Metaphor of the Month! Hit the Fan

No, you will not find this one in the OED. Yet this term may not only be sadly relevant for November but also it has a mysterious history. Finally, I find it a writerly challenge to post about a curse-word without cursing. Here goes.

I ran across our metaphor in Martin Clemens‘s nearly lost classic memoir, Alone on Guadalcanal. He was a British “coast watcher” who stayed behind when Imperial Japan occupied the island. After many tribulations, Clemens and his group of indigenous Melanesian scouts met the US Marines, who landed to liberate the island in 1942.

The Marines were in a tight place, being bombed around the clock, subjected to suicide charges, then bombarded by Japanese warships at night. The see-saw war went on for months, on an island ripe for Malaria, known for venomous snakes, and ringed by waters full of sharks. While in the Marine base, Clemens heard and recorded in his diary a bit of American slang that has continued to our day, for when excrement manages to contact a rotating air disperser.

Or something.

The term often gets dated back to Norman Mailer’s excellent, if gritty, novel of the Pacific War, The Naked and the Dead. Clemens’s usage predates Mailer’s, showing the military origin of the metaphor. Gary Martin of Phrase Finder, where a post appeared about our scatological metaphor, found a recorded use in 1943 and notes a possible Canadian origin from the 1930s.

I’m willing to bet that it goes back to the first USMC unit that had an electric fan in their barracks. If you know enlisted Marines, you can imagine what followed.

Send words and metaphors to jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Creative-Commons image courtesy of pxfuel.

Metaphor of the Month! The Loaded Pause

Ours is a frightening time. We not only have a pandemic that has killed more than a million people around the world, but in our nation we have the potential for political violence during and after our national election. I’ve volunteered to be a poll worker. It seems a small sacrifice, but one must do something to be sure we have an election we can trust.

As I searched for metaphors of hope, I came up dry (itself an apt, arid metaphor). So I went back to a moment from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films that gave me hope in the dark days of the Second Gulf War: Gandalf and Pippin at Minas Tirith, on the night before Sauron’s forces attack the city. Both characters have reason to be afraid of what the next day will bring. Gandalf does not give his Hobbit friend any false hopes, and he says that only “a fool’s hope” remains that Frodo and Sam will complete their quest.

Not cheery stuff at our present dark hour, but I think we can agree with a statement, in both film and book (spoken by a character named Beregond in Tolkien’s text, Gandalf in Jackson’s film) that we are experiencing “the deep breath before the plunge.” That’s a metaphor Tolkien coined, I suspect, but then I thought about other similar figures of speech.

“A loaded pause,” sounds ominous and proper for this month of October. Where did it come from, suggesting a short break in warfare, with both sides leaning on their loaded guns, waiting for battle to resume?

Several sources found in a casual Google search suggest an origin with Sir Winston Churchill, who frequently employed metaphors and, indeed, verbal pauses in his most famous speeches. Consider that he gave us “finest hour,” “Iron Curtain,” and mentioned how the lights were going out across Europe, on the eve of the Second World War. The final one itself nodded to Sir Edward Grey’s 1914 metaphor that “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.”

Churchill’s figurative language worked all the better to sway his audiences. In a 1936 speech, named after our metaphor, you can hear how he built an argument against Hitler’s rise; one senses war creeping ever closer. Yet in two times through, I don’t hear him utter our metaphor. It’s too good, however, to pass by.

I’m wishing for a Churchill, for all his faults and controversial legacy, or a Gandalf right now. I suspect many of you are, too. Here’s to wishing for better metaphors ahead.

Send us words and metaphors to feature here. Hopeful ones useful in academic work are most welcome! See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image of Parliament Square, London, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Metaphor of the Month! Annus horribilis

I will not list the bad things that have befallen us all in 2020. We still, in the States, must endure two more months before a fraught election, spikes in COVID deaths, civil unrest, tropical storms, wild fires, hurricanes, and perhaps a stray asteroid. Yes, a small one will pass the Earth the day before we go to the polls (or vote by mail and cross our fingers).

The idea for this metaphor struck me, like the eyewall of a Cat-4 storm, last night as I saw an image of our fragile, string-of-light cities dwarfed by Hurricane Laura. Truly, it’s a horrible year.

No, it’s not 1914 when Europe realized what modern warfare and the Maxim gun really meant. It’s not 1348 when the Black Plague carried off perhaps 50% of Europe’s populace. It’s not 1492, when the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas began, or 1619, when the first slave ships came to Virginia. It’s not 1945, a year of victory for the Allies but for the citizens of Axis nations, a time of fire-bombs, starvation, and atomic weaponry. It’s not even 1918-19, when the “Spanish Flu” (which seems to have begun at Fort Riley, Kansas) took the lives of perhaps 50 million, globally.

Have I made my point? Any of these could, depending on one’s view of events, be an “annus horribilis.” The term itself, a modern borrowing from Latin, surprises me by only dating to 1985. Queen Elizabeth II’s famous quip with the term comes 1992, and that’s when I first heard the phrase. If you are curious why, read this. The OED notes the kinship with the earlier annus mirabilis, or year of wonders. John Dryden published a book of that title in 1667.

I would enjoy a year of wonders in 2021. Wouldn’t you?

Send us words and metaphors, wondrous, horrid, or banal! E-mail jessid-at-richmond-dot-edu with your nominees. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image Credit: NASA/NOAA. Note the storm is visible from a million miles out.