vocabulary – Page 9 – Richmond Writing

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.

Word of the Week! Insolent

Professor Joanna Drell, History, stopped me in the hall today with a nomination for my “word thing.” I was delighted, as I do have a “thing for words” (literally and metaphorically) and also because “insolent” was a thing I’d been called many times in grade school by nuns. Probably “you insolent thing!” got pinned to me a few times.

Am I insolent now in my tone? And where does our word originate?

My teachers and mentors probably (and rightly) got after me for being “contemptuous of rightful authority,” as The OED entry notes in its second definition. I often still am, usually asking “by whose rights?”

Other definitions do not fall far from that one, though the first strikes me as curious, “Proud, disdainful, haughty, arrogant, overbearing; offensively contemptuous of the rights or feelings of others. Said of the powerful, rich, or successful, their actions.” The OED notes that this usage has become obsolete, but I find it fascinating how our word got associated with wealth and privilege.

Tell that to Robespierre, on your way to the guillotine.

Obsolete, really? There I am, being insolent again. The word, from Latin, proves as old as insolence itself, with a first-recorded usage dating to 1386.

Nominate a word by stopping me in the hall or by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

Insolent kid (I know that face!) courtesy of Wikipedia

Word of the Week! Fungible

Two mushrooms walk into a bar. The bartender shouts “Out with you! No plants allowed!”

One ‘shroom replies “Hey, I’m no plant! I’m a fungi!”

Okay, it’s not only a bad joke, but it should be “a fungus” (singular) for you botanical purists. In any case, I did just check and fungi are not considered plants.

When my colleague Professor Jack Molenkamp, Visiting Lecturer in Business Law and Adv Business Law in the Robins School of Business, requested our word, that old joke reared its fungible head. Yet why “fungible” for a bad joke?

In law or business, a fungible commodity can be exchanged for another without “breaking the terms of a contract,” as The OED patiently explains. We see this at rental-car agencies, when the Nissan Sentra you planned to rent gets replaced by a Toyota Corolla. Under the terms of the rental agreement, you get a compact car in return for the daily fee; no guarantee of color or model gets stated. If one reads the small print, it specifies that another make can be substituted. Thus, anything fungible can be broadly considered “interchangeable” or “replaceable.”

As Thanksgiving approaches, consider the self-inflicted plight of Neal Page, Steve Martin’s character from the brilliant Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Trying without success to get home in time for Thanksgiving, Neal encounters one disaster after another, raging at a clerk that he just wants to get into a [expletive deleted] car. No dice for Neal. He should have read the contract that he threw away in anger; his car is gone from its parking spot but without the paperwork, the rental agency has no legal obligation to provide another fungible asset to replace the one for which he just paid.

Like Neal’s car, a fungible item, or side dishes offered with the entree (without an upcharge) at a restaurant, the subject of a “walk into a bar” joke can be exchanged infinitely for other subjects without changing the terms of the joke. Thus my favorite:

A three-legged dog walks into a saloon in the Old West and says “I’m lookin’ for the man who shot my paw.”

Okay, I’m done. My colleague did not need bad jokes, but he did need to tell me how greatly it puzzled him that his students did not know the meaning of “fungible.” I agree with him: anyone in business or law needs to understand the concept of fungibility.

As with “pagination” last time, I lay the blame on students not being serious-enough readers. You cannot acquire a strong vocabulary without reading. Sorry, students. Since few students read blogs, I again address my audience of faculty and staff. What are the key words in your field that an undergrad should know before getting a degree?

Why does the lack of reading among students (and peers!) irritate as much as, say, Neal’s situation in the rental car lot?

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.

Photo mashup by me. I prefer the Corolla’s grille and hue.

Word of the Week! Paginate

Students delight me when they ask the meaning of a word I use. I do not dumb down my vocabulary for them, though I also do not employ arcane jargon best left to fellow specialists in my field. Asking mentors provides one good method for learning new words. Reading, of course, works even better.

But when I was asked what “paginated” means, for a moment I got taken aback. Not in contempt for my undergraduate questioner but for an increasingly digital world we inhabit, a world that terrifies me because like universities, I see a culture of bookishness as a shield against a Dark Age that might be as close as a few more tragic national elections.

The word “paginate” comes from a post-Classical Latin root, paginare, dating to the end of the last Dark and Middle Ages in the 15th Century.

Modern usage in English for “paginate” dates to the middle of the 19th. That’s not a long time, historically. To paginate means to put a text in order by pages. Nothing more nor less. The OED entry comes across as simply and elegantly as a well designed book.

Now, with real concern I don’t know if the Enlightenment that followed pagination, sparked by printed books, has run its course. Some of my students are anxious about this, understandably, and that brings some comfort. They will have to fix it, as with climate change, racism, and other evils of our era.

As a reader who knows me can attest, I am a person of the book. Personal and public libraries likewise bring comfort in uncertain times and remind me, a first-generation college student, how tenuous and precious a life of books can be, as well as hard-won. Please do not call me a Luddite–I code poorly and manage a Web server–but what Howard Rheingold called the Amish: a techno-selective.

Like shifting my own gears and working a clutch, a now-arcane art I mastered at age 60, buying, reading, and collecting printed texts puts me close to a technology. Two, really: bookmaking and the language we use to communicate.

While I do read some scholarly and journalistic work on a screen, most all reading for pleasure gets done using paper texts that have page numbers. One odd exception: Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, since I began them that way on my iPad in 20`14 when traveling in Scotland (I’m going to read the fourth installment next summer).

My students, on the other hand, inhabit a different world, a mostly unpaginated world. Even back in 2011, as I reported here, blogs like this one were being read and written less by young people. Incidentally and coincidentally, first-recorded use of “pagination” dates to 200 years before that blog post, a bit earlier than the verb form. One wonders how long a run it will enjoy, now.

So be it. What students do with their free time is their choice. I’m delighted when they read this blog, but faculty, staff, and visitors have long been my audience here. Yet for everyone, the world of ideas demands long-form narrative in many fields and books remain a remarkable technology for delivering these narratives.

How to fight this? When my students do bibliographic word, I make them delve into a few print-only resources, citing their work with page references. Yes, I check every one of those.

More hangs in the balance than we might imagine, retaining even faintly a culture of paginated books. I’m worried enough about paginated media that I’m going to start a new category of posts here for endangered words.

Image source: Duke Humfrey’s Library, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, via Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Diligent

Just today I thanked a student for being so diligent. Then I wondered when she may have last heard that word. The word seems, like diligence itself, to have fallen out of favor in our harum-scarum culture.

This week’s term is OLD. Look at the OED’s entry, with a first recorded use of 1340. The Latin roots of our word need no lengthy explication. What strikes me as fascinating involves the rather small number of definitions: like the virtue signified, the word for it remains industriously, assiduously, painstakingly, on a single path. I got to use a few synonyms in that sentence, too.

Now don’t mistake being diligent for being brilliant. Sometimes to pays to “work smarter,” as a cliche goes. But attention to details never hurts.

Finally, consider being diligent before using “super,” a word I detest in writing and tolerate with a cringe in speech. Yes, cringe. I will lose that battle. Why not avoid “he worked super hard” and instead use “he worked diligently”?

Because: rushed, careless, harum-scarum. And there I rest my case as diligently as a I can.

Nominate a word 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 by Enokson from Flicker. I keep bee-hives and these creatures exemplify diligence.

Word of the Week! Jurisprudence

I have a student taking a class on this topic, yet she remained unaware of the term’s precise meaning.

Being of no help until we consulted The OED, I decided that we had a new word for our blog. What I found at The OED entry surprises me. I’d guessed that the word serves the same purpose as “pedagogy” in my field: a theory of learning. In the case of jurisprudence, we have a theory of law.

That proved accurate, but one definition arose: skill with practicing law. That nuance gets at another worthwhile meaning, indicated by the same root that gives us “prudent,” or taking care, being careful.

Finally, our word can indicate a body of laws, something that relates it to the notion of legal precedent.

I hope this post assists my student bound for law school as much as I have enjoyed writing it!

Nominate a word 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 John Houseman from The Paper Chase.

Words of the Week! Reign, Rein, Rain

Queen Elizebeth II’s long reign just ended. She took the reins of power in 1953, on a day of rain.

Sounds simple? No. They all sound the same.

As with other homonyms I have featured here, such as weather and whether, these words get tangled up in student prose. I take points off but give my writers a week to earn them back by showing they have learned the difference. No easy mnemonic exists, as it does for here and hear (“hear as an ear in it”). So here (not hear) we all need memorization and use in print, as though we were English-Language Learners.

We encounter our words often via metaphor: Reign of Terror, rein in your enthusiasm. We take a horse by the reins, though as the OED shows us in the etymology of the word with Middle English origins, this strip of leather going to the horse’s mouth was once spelled “reign.”

So does a monarch reign by taking the reins of the population, metaphorically, and leading them? Not so much in these days of nearly universal constitutional monarchies, but we begin to see how the words could be confused! Reign shares a different Middle-English Origin (regn vs. reen), according the OED. In those ancient words, we can hear the difference. Not so now. “Reign” has multiple senses that include the realm of a monarch as well as the period of time the monarch rules.

How to get students to stop confusing them? I have no idea. Sorry to rain on your parades, but -10 points and one week to read this post, kids!

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 Queen Elizabeth II’s Gold State Coach: note footman beside the horses’ reins, at the start of her reign, 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.”

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! Bombast

thesaurus picture

This word came up in class today. We discussed what academic writing is not, and my students noted that mere opinion and an “extreme tone” disqualify work from serious consideration.

So I dropped a “bombastic bomb” on them. Yet this week’s term has nothing to do with explosives. As “bumbast” or “bombaste,” in the 16th Century the term meant the “soft down of the cotton plant,” and could also mean earplugs made of cotton. I’d suppose, from the OED entry, that one plugged one’s ears to avoid hearing a bombastic speaker who employed the current meaning, “Inflated or turgid language; high-sounding language on a trivial or commonplace subject.”

Has this word fallen out of favor? Or simply settled into a settled definition? The latest OED usage dates back 172 years.

If “bombast” proves new to you, as a word in any case, consider some synonyms from a wonderful 1943 book I just found in my favorite used bookstore, Charlottesville Virginia’s Blue Whale Books. The American Thesaurus of Slang, by lexicographers Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van Den Bark (such names!) set forth an exhaustive listing of terms not considered formal. It’s a trove of lost words. Several book dealers online list a second edition of 1964; I highly recommend a copy.

Berrey and Van Den Bark give us dozens of great terms, from “Barnumize, bloviate, flash the gab, crack one’s jaw, swallow the dictionary, talk highfalutin’.”

None are very formal, save “bloviate,” which captures saying a lot of large words without saying much of anything. The suggested term “polysyllabic profundity” fails there, since bombast proves as fluffy as cotton. “Pompous prolixity” gets closer still to the empty nature of bombast. Unlike “bullshit,” bombast may be true, but the terms used are overly pompous.

What other terms capture a bombastic method of writing and speaking? Let me know. Meanwhile, thanks to several of you who recently sent me words and metaphors I will soon feature here. They are always welcome. 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.

Thesaurus image by the author.