vocabulary – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Stoic

Marcus Aurelius — Ra 61 b, Musée Saint-Raymond Toulouse

Here’s another word of great utility for our times. Our word describes a person who follows the teachings of Stoicism, well explained in this entry from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I encourage you to peruse this entry for a thorough examination of Stoicism’s origin, principles, and influences.

For our blog, however, let’s adapt the word to our times. “Stoic” has come to mean something different. Our subscription to The OED continues to remain dodgy, so I turned to a print source, The American Heritage Dictionary, unabridged and ponderous in my office.

I’m not satisfied by “One who is seemingly indifferent to or unaffected by joy, grief, pleasure, or pain” (you will also find that in their online entry). Why? This is but one meaning of the word, perhaps a casual one, and it does no justice to rich tradition of enduring hardships.

The dictionary definition misses the wisdom of thinkers such as Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, reducing a useful idea to a form of numbness. A Stoic temperament means something far deeper.

Let’s look at a quotation or two from each philosopher that illustrate the depth of the word.

From Aurelius, “If it is not right, do not do it, if it is not true, do not say it” and “Accept the things to which fate binds you and love the people with whom fate brings you together but do so with all your heart.”

I took these from a list at The Daily Stoic, but in my reading of the Emperor’s Meditations, one quotation struck me forcefully, and it was said by him in many different ways. Here’s one instance: “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

We can, in short, only control ourselves and a few things that relate to us.

For Epictetus, whose philosophy I chanced upon in Monticello’s gift shop (Jefferson was an avid reader of his and a Stoic), “There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will” and “Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.”

I have covered the term equanimity here before; a Stoic temperament embodies that virtue.

If a Roman Emperor realized this, with legions at his command, can we? With so much anxiety among friends, students, and colleagues, we might look back to Stoicism for a way to endure inevitable difficulties ahead.

Please send useful words and metaphors 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: Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Usufruct

Hold onto your chairs. This word erupted on me during my reading of Thomas Jefferson’s letters and travel-diaries, written when he was in France. To James Madison, in a well known 1789 missive about the Constitution, Jefferson claims:

I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.

You can find the letter in its entirety at The National Archives here. I’d never encountered our word before, so a bit of sleuthing can help me (and you) with this vital and hard-to-pronounce term. The OED is cranky today, not letting me in with my university account, but at least their fact sheet has some useful data: US pronunciation would be “YOO-zuh-fruhckt” and thanks to the non-paywalled Wikipedia, the meaning remains simple: “a usufruct is a system in which a person or group of persons uses the real property (often land) of another.”

I think that Jefferson sought to escape (Metaphor of the Month coming!) “the dead hand of the past,” as his new nation sought to remake itself as a Constitutional Republic. The document underpinning the Republic could and should be subject to change, as needs changed in the future.

Neither Madison nor Jefferson nor any of the Founders could do more than start a process, one never finished.

I suggest that in these times we all consider not only the word, still common in legal discourse, but also the concept as we enter uncertain times and the usufruct of our common nation remains an open question.

Please send useful words and metaphors to me at jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu or by leaving a comment below.

Image: Hamilton Fan-Art, Creative Commons License. Those rascals!

Words of the Week! Garden Hermit

Garden gnomes are delightfully odd features of modern gardens. I’ve seen them in the US, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales, but the English win the prize for the most gnomish landscape. I snapped the photo above in 2014, just starting a walk up Scotland’s Great Glen Way. I suspect that the resident of Fort William, who has a front garden full of gnomes, probably grew up south of Hadrian’s Wall. . .

Only recently did I learn of an once-popular and frankly, bizarre fad that peaked during 18th century: having paid hermits reside on country estates. This practice may have led to the plaster-and-cement creatures we now tuck behind a small bush.

In short: landowners hired human beings to live like hermits on their property. Yes, hermits in rustic clothing who might abide in a grotto, a hut, or a cabin. To quote from the Wikipedia entry on the topic of garden hermits:

Professor Gordon Campbell, of the University of Leicester, suggests that Francis of Paola was among the first of the trend, living as a hermit in the early 15th century in a cave on his father’s estate. He later served as a confidant and advisor to King Charles VIII.

Thus, a courtly hermit / advisor. Did he opine on garden design? Walking sticks? The placement of rocks in a grotto? Like so much else about this topic, the facts are simply lost to history.

I am looking forward to Dr. Campbell’s book A Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome. The word “hermit” itself has ancient roots, back to Antiquity and recluses living in deserts and other wild places. The OED notes that etymology spans back to the Greek ἐρημίτης, < ἐρημία for “desert.” Hermits themselves abounded then; I think of John the Baptist, St. Simon, or further East, Buddhist or Hindu mystics and wanderers. Islam has its own tradition of wise-but-rustic philosophers; I even ran across hints of hermitry in the Icelandic Sagas.

I’ve covered Hobo here before; though we think of Hobo life as communal, in many ways they embody a mobile form of hermitage and a rejection of societal norms. One finds the thread picked up by the Beat writers who worked for a season or two in fire towers out West, or Edward Abbey’s and Terry Tempest Williams’ sojourns in the deserts of Utah.

Before finding Campbell’s book, I briefly considered researching the history of hermits as a retirement project; alas, it has been done for me. Besides, I would never come up with such a clever title. My copy is on the way now from Powells Books in Chicago, one of the nation’s great booksellers.

To recap this odd bit of history: we have, in Europe, a roughly three-century period when living as a hermit on an estate could be done in order to make a living. These ornamental hermits might entertain visitors or simply provide amusement by being observed. In return the hermit got a stipend, a hovel, and I presume, a new hair shirt from time to time.

During Thomas Jefferson’s residence in France in the 1780s, he had the occasion to travel to the north of Italy. His letters to friends reveal that he encountered at least two hermitages in formal gardens. One had a plaster figure of a hermit installed, and the other had once housed a human being who played the role. It seems the custom was falling out of fashion by 1790. The hermits themselves had become plaster figures, on their way to diminished statue as garden gnomes we can buy in Wal Mart’s garden section.

So where, exactly, did a wealthy landowner go searching for a hermit? I cannot imagine want-ads reading “sociable recluse wanted for rustic abode on great estate” but perhaps my imagination is too limited.

Moreover, why did keeping a hermit on salary fall out of favor? One wishes the custom had endured until the time of Downton Abbey, at least as a joke make by one of the family. But by the early 20th Century, hermitages and their denizens appear only in books and paintings. Visit Maymont locally; they have a grotto in the Italian garden. No hermit resides, but you will find a nice bench or two in the grotto and can play hermit until the staff expel you.

In the end, I gained a clue as to the origin of the garden gnome. It endures, and even the word “hermit” has enjoyed a mild resurgence in use since the year 2000. Maybe in these utterly social (yet scary) times, some of us prefer the joys of solitude, though not in a premade grotto on some toff’s fancy estate.

Come out of your rustic abode to send me words or metaphors. I can be reached in my hermitage 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.

Word of the Week! Looming

This week I had planned for “portent,” but I see that I covered that term in 2020, just before the last national election. I guess like many of you I’m concerned, looking for portents. Whatever this year’s outcome, there are storm-clouds looming on the national horizon.

As a verb, our word traces its first recorded use to the 17th Century. Its etymology remains unclear, with The OED fact-sheet noting that it might be of Germanic origin. I enjoy words like that; in fact, it suits the mysterious sense of our word quite well.

We might use “loom” today to mean to tower over, threateningly, someone or something. While that usage retains a great deal of power, the word can also mean to appear indistinctly in the distance, the way a storm cloud might an hour or so before we run for cover. Depending upon the situation, we might employ “tower over” or “threaten” as synonyms.

Here’s a curious note: usage of our word enjoyed a steady rise in use since it appeared. Usage peaked about 1930, which by mid-decade Churchill called “The Locust Years”: these years were replete with looming troubles. Postwar, frequency of “looming” declined, bottoming out about 1990 and the beginning to increase. Do journalists like the word enough to put it back into circulation? Or do events of large consequence: political dysfunction, climate change, looming trillionaires, artificial intelligence, and pandemic drive the rise?

We all have a front-row seat, like Rockwell Kent’s landlubber on the dock from the illustration.

Whatever happens in a week, I wish you all well. Right now, it seems to me that small gestures of civility and open inquiry matter more than ever. It is a melodramatic thing to say to young people, but I remind my students every semester that I see our modern university system as a shield against a New Dark Age. Perhaps the shield has gotten battered by all the slurs hurled against higher education, but it remains one of the only shields I trust.

So if you have word or metaphor that might serve well in this season of loomings, 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: Rockwell Kent, “Loomings” from the first chapter of Melville’s Moby Dick.

Word of the Week! Dastardly

Thanks to Josh Wroniewicz, Director, Business Office at our Campus Business Services, for this nomination. In election season, we usually have major candidates calling each other names. “Dastardly” would be a fine, if rather quaint, bit of mud to sling at one’s opponent.

Younger Boomers and older Xers will recall Dick Dastardly, a mustachio-twirling villain of the silent-movie sort, who appeared in a few Saturday-morning cartoons from the late 1960s onward. He says things such as “curses! Foiled again!” before being flattened like a pancake or blown up by one of his own traps.

Today I find the cartoons cringeworthy, save for the infectious laugh of Dastardly’s dog, Muttley (think of him as The Anti-Snoopy). No, I cannot resist giving you a link to a short video of Dick’s and Muttley’s “best” moments. Despite this cornball association, the word retains a good deal of its antique power. Dick certainly fits a few obsolete meanings of our word, as given in the OED entry. He’s dull and stupid, at times, and when he hatches his hare-brained schemes, he usually acts in secret. Thus we get at a certain type of evil: done not openly but from under cover. This type of evil would not work with malevolent,” “sinister,” “diabolical,” or other terms for active, even gleeful, doers of evil.

The most common definition still in use would be “showing mean or despicable cowardice.” One OED example illustrates this nuance well, “The slanders of an avowed antagonist are seldom so mean and dastardly as those of a traitor.” The word comes from the 15th Century “dastard,” no longer used but of an interesting and possibly English origin.

That gives us a word far more inscrutable than the modern villain who takes its name.

The blog will continue all year, so send in useful words or metaphors, by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. You are invited to write a guest post as well.

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

Word of the Week! Galoot

I didn’t know this term’s origins, though I’ve long used it to mean someone large, clumsy, and unskilled. I suspect that students will encounter it in literature from the 19th Century, as well as Southern and Cowboy fiction. I’m fond of this week’s word, personally.

When we adopted a truly giant Anatolian Mountain Dog, Swede, he was never clumsy but got called a “big galoot” when he began working on our farm. An experienced livestock guardian dog, Vela, taught him the ropes. There I go with the nautical metaphors again, as noted in a recent post. In fact, a “galoot” can mean an inexperienced sailor, as the OED entry on our word notes. They cite a first recorded use from 1808.

Back to dog-as-galoot. With Vela’s passing Swede became boss-dog now on the farm, teaching a new dog how to protect livestock as these breeds do. So my galoot is no longer inexperienced. At over 150 pounds, and standing on all four feet taller than my hip, he remains large. And I still lovingly call him “the Big Galoot,” which got howls of laughter from a Scottish friend. Thus I assumed that the term might be from Scots Gaelic.

The OED lists the word’s etymology and origin as “uncertain” but corroborates my sense that one may find it in Southern US vernacular. I was surprised to see that the noun can refer to folks of any gender, as in this 1866 example: “Wake, Bessy, wake, My sweet galoot!” And thus this blog post dived down a digital and print rabbit-hole.

Perhaps Bessy in “Artemus Ward among Fenians” is a farm animal? Not so. She’s the wife of a character visited by the narrator Artemus Ward, the nom de plume for humorist Charles F. Browne. I own a disintegrating copy of the 1887 edition The Complete Works of Artemus Ward; Browne’s sketches, like so many pieces of what has come to be known as “The Humor of the Old Southwest,” skewered everyone, including Browne’s friend Abraham Lincoln. The Wikipedia entry notes that Lincoln read one of Ward’s sketches to his Cabinet before sharing The Emancipation Proclamation, perhaps to lighten the mood for an earth-shattering event. Lincoln was no galoot; he knew how to sway an audience.

Browne, a Maine native, traveled the Antebellum South, thus making him a Southern humorist, then England and Ireland. His work proved wildly popular; he even took the stage to portray Ward, Wikipedia puts it, as a Yankee rube gifted with common sense. He died young, while traveling abroad, in his 30s. One wonders if his reputation and literary work might have equaled those of his friend Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) had Browne lived longer.

Those with an interest in the humor that influenced Mark Twain need to study some of the work of Browne and his contemporaries in Humor of the Old Southwest, an anthology edited by Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham. Though out of print, cheap copies of a first and second edition abound. For a digital collection of Browne’s humor, you can find “Fenians” and other sketches at Project Gutenberg. Now back to this week’s word!

Frequency of our word rose rapidly until 1920, when a slow decline in usage, if not galoots, occurred. Things hit bottom in 1990. I’m heartened by a rebound since, with a noticeable uptake in usage this century. We clearly have no shortage of galoots about, some quite famous; it’s a gently non-sectarian, bipartisan, international jibe on anyone new, unskilled, perhaps clumsy. I enjoy how the term lacks malice, if not exasperation. We all are galoots, as some point. “Greenhorn” in Wild-West slang or “still wet behind the ears” captures some aspects of being a galoot.

I’ve wandered, like Browne’s alter-ego, all over Ireland and Scotland without finding the origin of “galoot.” Got any ideas? Please share!

Send in useful words or metaphors, by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. You are invited to write a guest post as well.

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

Image of galoot and best friend, by me. you decide which is the galoot.

Word of the Week! Apricate

Thanks to George Hiller, on the faculty of our School of Professional and Continuing Studies, for tipping me off, back when it was still summer. Professor Hiller noted six forgotten summertime words defined in a short BBC video.

Of all six, I find apricate most interesting. I’m no sun-lover or summer-lover. My year begins when the heat breaks. That said, a little time in the sun proves healthy for your body’s levels of Vitamin D. Cats must know this. My pair love to apricate. Aprication for me begins on Fall afternoons, though begrudgingly I apricate in summer, usually when doing farmwork in the morning.

From Wiktoniary, we have the definition “to bask in the sun,” but what’s the etymology of our word? The Latin apricus, or as defined in this online source, “warmed by the sun.”

We can use sun-bathing, basking, tanning, or the casual “lie out” as synonyms. I suppose others exist.

Savor a bit of apricity (the light or warmth of the sun), moderately, while you can, all fall and winter. It’s good for you mentally and physically, and most likely you won’t get a sunburn.

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.

Image Source: Kitty apricating, from the Wiktonary page about our word.

Metaphors of the Month! Nautical Terms

Strolling through the Second Floor of Boatwright Library the other day, I spotted some works on display from our Rare-Books collection. Since I have an unfathomable interest in nautical words, I turned a weather eye toward that case of treasures.

It must the the lore of sea faring that hooks me. I’m decidedly not a “water person,” my biggest adventures in a boat involves paddling a 12′ kayak in the salt marshes of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. When I see the line of breakers meaning the bay or ocean, I pivot back and head for home. So I’m an armchair swab, I suppose. Since “swab,” being the verb for mopping up a deck, can also mean “sailor,” we have our first October metaphor.

The image snapped by me comes from Jessica Spring’s book Fathoming, printed in a special 2015 edition with a set of tobacco cards (itself an old-timey collectible). The cards pictured feature three metaphors clearly from sailing or ships: “three sheets to the wind,” “loose cannon,” and “in the same boat.” I will leave it up to the reader to recall times they or someone they know embodied any of those phrases.

Yet “Rummage Sale” proved new to me. The description reads “from the French arrumage, to load a cargo ship. Damaged cargo was sold as arrumage, or rummage.” We don’t say “rummage sale” too often these days, with land lubbers’ “flea markets,” or in the UK, motorists’ “boot sales” taking their place.

Other nautical metaphors can be found all around us. Think of how frequently “anchor” works as an active verb or strategically employed noun.

Some have become bit dated, like “steamer trunk”: I suspect that few of us travel with them, today. Half a century ago, however, college students often toted one to the dorm. There it then served as a bench (if sturdy enough), a table, or an extra closet to hold extra linens, maybe a secret bottle to let said student and friends get three sheets to the wind.

When bad weather looms, I say “batten down the hatches,” though I did not know what a “batten” was until I restored some 150 year-old board-and-batten doors from a farmhouse. Battens are the nailed-down cross boards that hold the door together. If someone says “pipe down,” they are metaphorically sounding a bosun’s whistle, while you probably learned the ropes without ever climbing a ship’s rigging. And I do tell employees that for some events, we need all hands on deck.

You can amuse yourself for a long time looking over the nautical terms that NOAA describes in a blog post. You may even find some of these terms slipping into harbor in academic prose. Meanwhile, don’t fall into the doldrums before the next post. Let NOAA’s post and Captain Google tide you over. I’ll weigh anchor now, so until next time, fair winds and smooth sailing.

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.

Word of the Week! Ennui

Some time back, I picked up a copy of Thomas Jefferson: Travels, Anthony Brandt’s edited collection of Jefferson’s correspondence from 1784-1789, his years working in Paris. I find the “American Sphinx,” to use Joseph Ellis’ term, endlessly fascinating in all his complexities, obscurities, and patent hypocrisy. In some ways, his is the story of the state of Virginia, even the entire South. Partly my interest stems from Deism, a spiritual path I share with the Founding Father, partly the long shadow cast by my alma mater, The University of Virginia.

Jefferson, with his many flaws, lacked one: idleness. That brings us to our word, one he saw as the emotional outcome of doing nothing. Here, in a letter to Martha Jefferson from 1787, “guard you at all times against ennui, the most dangerous poison of life. A mind always employed is alway happy. . . .it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui is. . .” In an earlier letter from the same month, he finds the cause of such poison to be “want of industry which I had begun to fear would be the rock on which you would split.”

Ennui, as befits Jefferson’s experience, come to us from French. In its modern sense, it only dates to 1758, during Jefferson’s own lifetime. Thus, we have a ‘Modern Problem”! On the other hand, The OED dates an older sense to the 13th century, meaning “weariness.” Often the word “annoy” got employed in the same sense.

The modern loan word implies an annoyance or torpor of the soul, a lassitude. it’s that waiting-for-Godot state of mind. I’ve covered the words malaise and doldrum here before. They both can be used as near synonyms for our week’s word.

I fear we turn to dopamine-dispensers called smart phones and social media for quick bandages to slap over ennui, when instead we might find uses for our time that leave us with something tangible. If you experience ennui, get some exercise. Do some useful work. Improve your mind (and yes, you can find such content via a phone). As Jefferson advises Martha, “it is wonderful how much can be done, if we are always doing.”

Spend your time well! Send us a word or metaphor and I will feature it here. Let me know by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or by leaving a comment below. Also let us know if you would like to write a guest column.

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

Image Source: Ennui by Robert Seymour, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Word of the Week! Shenanigans

Thanks to Kim Chiarchiaro, of the Modlin Center For the Arts, who nominated this wonderful word. We see the word in names of bars, unusually, and not the sort where I want to order a Martini (somewhat dry, Hendricks Gin, dash of bitters, clean not dirty, olive not lemon, shaken and VERY cold, thank you). Try that on a server or bartender in a bar named Shenanigans. You might get punched out.

Yet beyond that dark vision, the word has a Gaelic sound. I asked the robotic brain at the OED, and found “unknown origin.” Now we have a mystery. The definitions are also delightful, including “Trickery, skulduggery, machination, intrigue; teasing, ‘kidding’, nonsense; (usually plural) a plot, a trick, a prank, an exhibition of high spirits, a carry-on.” The OED records first usage as 1855.

The word might be a bit informal for student work, but I’m thinking that it could be of use to scholars describing several rascals, past or present, who influenced public events. Have shenanigans increased in the past century? I am not certain, but the usage of the term has skyrocketed, from 0 instances in 1870 to just under .05 instances per million words in 1930 to .25 per million in 2010.

Shenanigans may also be on the rise.

This blog will continue all year, so send words and metaphors of interest by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or by leaving a comment below. Also let us know if you would like to write a guest column.

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

Image courtesy of Wikipedia, from the University of Tulsa’s alumni who placed a memorial stone to celebrate “wonderful memories of their college days, including their participation in many shenanigans.”