STEM – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Agentic

We have this week a neologism that I encounter, suddenly, almost daily. The word is one you need to know, if the enthusiasts for certain technologies are not stretching the truth. Our word proves too new even to appear in The OED.

Soon it will. But what does it mean? In the current contexts about artificial intelligence, “agentic” means autonomous, making decisions on their own. Agentic AI does more than answer a query; it can be given parameters for complex tasks and then go about solving them in a manner it best sees fit. Human input may not be needed by such systems.

I’m thinking of travel a lot lately, and how, before I moved to Spain in 1985, I went to a travel agency with lots of general ideas. I then relied upon them to provide me with several affordable options for touring France and Spain before I arrived in Madrid, for a job interview that led to my first paying teaching gig.

Flash forward 40 years: tonight I dined at a really fine place in Richmond’s West End for sushi and sashimi. I’ve been curious about it since spotting it, so for about 20 minutes I read I used my phone to read reviews, comparing notes others left, looking at how it ranks with other similar places.

Flash forward again to the year 2030: Had I an agentic AI to help, I could have simply said “Hal, could you brief me on the strengths and shortcomings of the food at XYZ? I’m thinking of going.” No huge prompt needed. Hal would perform a number of tasks to discuss happy or unhappy reviews, prices, comparisons, even where the place sources its seafood. It could find out that Kirin Beer, my dad’s favorite, was on tap. I quaffed one in his honor today.

Agency of this sort does not, luckily, imply sentience; I’ve covered the term sentient here before. Even so, these new AI systems already have reshaped industries, if New York Times reporter Kevin Roose’s work holds true. You will need to get past the paper’s paywall to read the entire story, but Roose’s latest column focuses on the downturn in employment for recent college grads. In a podcast Roose prepared from this article, he and his cohost claim that for young college-educated workers, “if you look at the unemployment rate for college graduates right now, it is unusually high. It’s about 5.8 percent in the US. That has risen significantly, about 30 percent since 2022.”

This while overall unemployment stands at historic lows. One theory? Industries are simply automating a record number of entry-level positions. The replacement has proven acute in fields such as finance and computer science.

As agentic AI expands its scope and abilities, how many more jobs will also vanish?

These are questions we humans need to ask, we who have been agentic for longer than our primate ancestors had fire or went on two legs. We need to have a conversation, too, about how agentic we want our cybernetic companions to become. That’s not a doomsday warning, but if one loses a career and means of support, the outcome is dire.

As I tell my students, “if you want a job soon, you must add value to AI output.” Too many of them see AI as a shortcut. That’s not wise. Yet even if the students get wise about leveraging AI’s abilities, agentic AI may make statements like mine sound, and here comes a future metaphor of the month, like whistling in the dark.

AI did not write this piece, but if you or your AI have words or metaphors useful in academic writing, send them along 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.

Creative-Commons image from Flickr of a wonderful old-school travel agency in Glasgow, Scotland’s Great Western Road. I’ve been there, but the agency must be long gone.

Word of the Week! Phantabulating

Professor Joe Hoyle in our Business School, a frequent nominator of words here, writes “I was reading today’s Washington Post and came across this sentence, ‘The reason Elon Musk frequently escapes account from other judges is because they don’t see through his phantabulating?’ I turned to my wife once I read, “phantabulating” and said, ‘That sounds like a Joe Essid word.’ Which mystified my wife.” You can read the Post story here, about a ruling against Musk in a Delaware court.

Joe, I don’t use “phantabulating” but I like that word a great deal.

Let’s stop mystifying your wife about our word. An abstract from a medical publication notes that “Phantabulation is characterized by frequent and purposeful interactions with contextually appropriate imagined objects. We suggest that this phenomenon results from confusion between real and imagined objects.”

That definition seems to vary from hallucination. If I see a banana on the countertop when no banana is present, I have hallucinated. If, however, I see a banana where a tomato sits on the counter, yes, we have no banana but I have phantabulated.

Some of you have may have read Oliver Sacks’ excellent book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It has been a few years, but the title itself suggests phantabulating, though a bit of re-reading reveals something very different. I recall that the patient Sacks describes, Dr. P., grabs his spouse’s head for a moment, confusing her for his nearby hat. Technically, however, as the Wikipedia entry for the book notes, Sacks’ patient “has visual agnosia. He perceives separate features of objects, but cannot correctly identify them or the whole objects that they are part of.”

Now back to Elon Musk. He recently announced that SpaceX’s Starship reusable rocket would be enlarged and updated for missions to the stars. Not Mars, 49 millions miles from us (give or take) but, say, to our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. I found in Brittanica Online that the star-system lies “4.24 light-years away. A light-year is 9.44 trillion km, or 5.88 trillion miles. That is an incredibly large distance. Walking to Proxima Centauri would take 950 million years.”

Wear your best hiking boots and pack a good lunch.

Humans have difficulty with such speeds and distances, but imagine traveling 30,000 km each second, or 1/10 the speed of light. We’d reach the Moon in 13 seconds from Earth. In four decades, we’d arrive at Proxima.

Mr. Musk has a gift not simply for overstatement but also a remarkable ability to project his vision on technology that does not yet exist, though it’s contextually relevant. Looking at his current interplanetary tomato called Starship, Mr. Musk envisions a future interstellar banana Starship.

So I’d not buy a ticket on a SpaceX interstellar vacation, if I were you. Elon is phantabulating again.

If you have a word or metaphor you enjoy, send them by e-mail (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: Phantabulated from here and there.

Word of the Week! Hyaline

Special thanks to Jessie Bailey, UR’s Assistant Director of Recruiting, Admission, and Student Services for this excellent and timely word. Jessie adds:

In the adjective form, it means having a glassy, translucent appearance. As a noun, it means “a thing that is clear and translucent like glass, especially a smooth sea or clear sky.”

It looks like it’s used in biology and entomology to describe things like human tissues and insect wings.

I came across it this past week in the book Solenoid by Mircea Catarescu, where it was easy to remember because he uses it a lot.

The OED entry seconds Jessie’s definitions, if you wish to take a look. The roots are Greek and Latin, for glass or crystal. You’ll find guidelines for pronunciation, too. In both British and US examples, “leen” or “line” work.

The metaphorical use for smooth, glassy water really strikes my fancy at this time of year. I hope your days are equally hyaline in the summer months ahead.

Send in useful words or metaphors, 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.

Creative Commons image courtesy of Wallpaper Flare.

Word of the Week! Unconformity

A few days ago, I watched a moving and well made BBC video about how geologist James Hutton recognized what we now call Deep Time. That metaphor will appear in a future post.

Meanwhile, consider what the geologist saw when he looked at Siccar Point in eastern Scotland. As the Wikipedia entry puts it, an unconformity means “places where the junction between two types of rock formations can be seen.” I myself saw The Great Unconformity a little less than a year ago, when I spent three days at the South Rim of The Grand Canyon.Keep in mind that an unconformity implies missing material, too. Where rocks meet, millions of years of the earth’s history may have vanished without leaving a trace.

This realization puts our four-score (or so) years into a perspective that can be humbling, exhilarating, or terrifying to those who view an unconformity. More than a few viewers, faced with this dizzying truth, deny it.

No photos of such formations can do justice to the real thing. What I first saw on a hazy Northern Arizona afternoon sent me reeling. Such a vista, though smaller, sent Hutton and his companions into some colorful prose. John Playfair wrote “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.” Hutton noted how time suddenly seemed to have “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

Hutton and his friends were not the first to ponder Deep Time. Consider Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who wrote in his Meditations “What a tiny part of the boundless abyss of time has been allotted to each of us – and this is soon vanished in eternity.”

What about outside geology? As late as 1982, a writer referred to “unconformities” in Shakespeare’s history plays. As to what that statement implies about errors, or missing material, I don’t know. You can see other examples at The OED.

I rather cherish nonconformists, so I like this word for more than rocks. It merits wider use and even wider practice.

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.

Creative-Commons image by Anne Burgess of “Hutton’s Section.” Grand Canyon image by me.

Word of the Week! Marcescence

My wife Nancy gets credit for this post, when she pointed out how the Beech trees in our woods hold their leaves all winter. Oaks do for a while, too, after the first cold snap. Nan informed me that this quality of some plants is called marcesence.

I’m a tree lover, not a scientist, so this quality of some plants appealed to me when their marcescent leaves rattle in the wind. The OED entry gives that adjective a “Band 2” in usage, meaning it keeps company with “words which occur fewer than 0.01 times per million words in typical modern English usage.” As lexical items go, in English it’s a newcomer, dating to scientific usage in the 18th Century, with (as we can hear when we say it) a Latin progenitor meaning to wither.

I’m certain any faculty who teach botany use our word more frequently. The quality of marcescence may, as the Wikipedia entry notes, protect the plant from large browsing herbivores who otherwise would much on twigs and smaller branches.

No offense to them and their work, but it’s a word we Humanists should steal. It has an onomatopoeic sound, like the murmuring of dry Beech leaves. Our word is rife with metaphor, particularly at the start of a new semester.

Do you have any old leaves you need to shed? Or ones to hold onto that may protect you until Spring?

As Tennyson says in one of the poems that can be found his Arthurian epic Idylls of the King, “the new leaf ever pushes off the old.” Soon we and those trees clinging to their leaves won’t have a choice.

Hello, January.

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 of partially marcescent Beech courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Postulate

I just used this word, as a verb, in class as I noted how we work with student writers. We first look for patterns of error, postulate why, then ask writers why they repeat a certain error. This method, pioneered by scholar and teacher David Bartholomae at Pittsburgh, goes by the name “error analysis.”

For once, I got a high-falutin’ term correct. The OED notes both verb and noun forms of our word. In my case, I hit the nail squarely: “posit or assume.” Many other definitions occur here, from ecclesiastical to legal. Mostly the word came up during my education in sciences or philosophy. To employ it sounds less partial than “question” and less puffy than “hypothesize.” That last word triggers a near-but-not-absolute pet peeve of mine against too many -ize words. That said, I prefer the verb “postulate” or even “hypothesize” to “suppose” (making a less precise claim) or “claim” (less certain of the outcome or reason).

These nuances make philologists get up in the morning.

As a noun, “postulate” has an interesting way of being at odds with itself, and this difficulty may come from the field of study employing it. Our term can mean both “An unfounded or disputable unproved assumption; a hypothesis, a stipulation, an unproven theory” or “A proposition or assumption taken to be self-evident or obvious; an axiom” (emphasis added). Oh my.

So tell me how your academic field uses this clever little word. While you are at it, 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.

Screen cap from Thomas Dolby’s definitive postulate about New-Wave Music, “She Blinded Me With Science.”

Word of the Week! Zoonotic

Avian influenza has made its appearance as close to us as Henrico County. Don’t panic, however, as the disease is not zoonotic.

If that confuses you, it should at present. That said, I have a feeling that rather like “endemic” and “comorbidity,” our word will one day become common parlance. Sadly.

It denotes a disease that can be passed from animals to humans, as COVID-19 appears to have been at its point of origin, Wuhan. The current strain of Avian Flu cannot, though for those who keep backyard or farm poultry (as I do) it means keeping wild birds away from domestic fowl through isolating feed sources, hanging up netting, and other measures. We want to protect our animals and keep this virus from mutating if possible.

Some other forms of Avian Flu, notably H1N1, are zoonotic and rather terrifying. While writing this, I speculated that the Bubonic Plague is not, as it comes from fleas carried by rats, not by the rats themselves. The World Health Organization notes otherwise, as Plague passes to humans from bacteria that the flea and rat carry. Thus, it’s zoonotic. That makes any mosquito-borne illness zoonotic too.

As The OED entry on our word indicates, zoonotic first registered in print in 1877, as modern medicine became better able to track the origins of diseases.

Do you have a word or metaphor that may enjoy common use soon? 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 courtesy of Wikipedia

Word of The Week! Bombogenesis

Here’s a new word, first noted in 1989 by The OED’s entry. It’s an apt term for human-generated climate change! First we had an A-Bomb, then an H-Bomb to trouble our sleep.

Now we have bombogenesis, “a rapid and sustained fall of barometric pressure. . .indicative of the strengthening of the cyclone into a powerful storm; also called explosive cyclogenesis.” NOAA’s web site as a fine description of the phenomenon. It’s also brief, a rarity for such a complex concept.

Call it what you will, but if you live in New England or Atlantic Canada today, you have experienced the forces behind our word, first-hand. I just spoke to my cousins in New Brunswick who were bracing for the arrival of the deep snow and blizzard conditions that accompany bombogenesis.

I’ve heard the less Latinate “Bomb Cyclone” and certainly, other synonyms must exist. As a person who loves snow and cold and hates hot, humid weather, I’ll take bombogenesis over malarial miasma, any day.

Stay warm and dry. Send me words and metaphors by leaving a comment below, or by e-mail at jessid-at-richmond-dot-edu.

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

Public domain image via NOAA’s photo-stream 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.