Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Autodidact

What do David Bowie and Jane Austen have in common, other than being English? They both were self-taught in their professions.

We have a nomination this week from Sarah Spencer, a junior majoring in psychology. Sarah picks a fine word. I thought I had covered this before, but no. And like me, Sarah must have met her share of autodidacts.

My late friend Gary Braswell, who earned a GED, exemplified the self-taught person who defines autodidacts. Gary possessed the sort of math skills I’d have died for (or finished Engineering School with) in the 1980s. He read books about theoretical physics and could talk about String Theory, Dark Matter, and Special Relativity.

We seem to have an uptick in auto-didacticism, if the OED’s usage chart proves correct. The portal is acting up today, though I’ve signed in through the university account, but the snapshot shown here reveals a steep rise in usage since World War II. Are all those garage geniuses from Silicon Valley, many of them drop-outs, responsible? Bill Gates and Steve jobs make the list, as do Leonardo da Vinci, Elon Musk, Jane Austen, Abraham Lincoln, Ben Franklin, Maya Angelou, Thomas Edison, Malcolm X, The Wright Brothers, and (Have you ever been experienced?) Jimi Hendrix and my favorite musician, David Bowie.

Seeing the paucity of women on that quick search I dug in more to discover Jane Jacobs, who wrote one of the best works about urbanism. Then Charlotte Perkins Gilman, famous for her story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and whose early 20th Century utopian novel Herland remains a key landmark in the history of feminist literature.

Autodidacts fascinate me as they do Sarah. The best I’ve done as an autodidact has been to teach myself automotive repair, and I’m proud of my work getting one classic car back on the road and two more running well. I can do most minor repairs and a few major ones, though I leave brake-work to experts. If a car won’t start, I can call for help. If it won’t stop, on the other hand. . . YouTube certainly helped, but a lot involved trial and error. I can build fences, stone walls, even small buildings for our farm, too, but I got hands-on training with two expert builders. That training would not qualify me as an autodidactic carpenter.

Except for a hiatus for a while in June, this blog will continue in the summer months, so send words and metaphors of interest 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.

Word of the Week! Fickle

Oh, the “Flying Fickle Finger of Fate,” which is where I first heard our word, as a wee lad, back when “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” was the hottest show on television in 1968. Their FFFF was an award of dubious distinction given for a poor performance. The US Congress was the first recipient. Makes sense. They have earned a lifetime award.

So there. That’s where I learned how fickle fate can be. But I never learned the origin or currency of our word. So let’s have a look, shall we?

Our word has multiple origins but all point to something changeable, unusally not in a good way. Some of fickleness relates to dishonesty, though the OED gives both that original meaning and a newer one meaning “puzzling.” Often fickle behavior, from a person or even the weather, puzzles us even if it does not hurt us.

From about the year 1200, we have “false, treacherous, deceptive, deceitful, crafty” (obsolete), probably from Old English ficol “deceitful, cunning, tricky,” related to befician “deceive,” and to facen “deceit, treachery; blemish, fault.” Common Germanic (compare Old Saxon fekan “deceit,” Old High German feihhan “deceit, fraud, treachery”), from the same source as “foe.” This all comes from the The Online Etymology Dictionary. Fickleness, then, antagonizes the predictable.

We live in fickle times. It seems that anything can happen, which could explain why since Rowan and Martin’s day, usage of the word has doubled from 1968 to 2014, attested by the entry cited above. The OED also records a more gradual uptick.

There are other words I would rather see gain popularity. Wouldn’t you? I hope no fickle fingers point your way this summer, but this blog will continue in the summer months, and I hope in some form in 2025, when I retire from full-time teaching on our faculty.

So until they carry me out feet-first after some fickle fate finds me, send words and metaphors of interest 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 Source: from a site selling an original FFFF award!

Metaphor of the Month! Bittersweet

So here we are, on the final day of classes. Exam week looms, then a break until commencement. I’ll attend with some cherished faculty Colleagues who are about to retire. My own retirement comes at the end of the Fall term, so this Commencement ceremony will be doubly bittersweet.

What a fine and timely word. Yet when was it first coined? The etymology needs no explication, though the usage has gone from a 14th Century origin meaning a food or drink that is both bitter and sweet to adjectives literal and metaphorical.

In the realm of nouns, one can still find a variety of apple called a Bittersweet. Indeed, the noun for “a bitter sweet” has usage stretching back nearly as far, and the OED’s entry shows it, too, as obsolete. Modern usage of the adjective, beyond a literal sense close to the 14th Century’s, implies “something, such as an experience or emotion, that is both pleasant and tinged with pain or sadness.”

We all have these experiences that stay in memory; I will never forget my final day in Paris, after a year abroad teaching in Spain. The following day I’d begin my trek back to the States and graduate school in the Fall of 1986. That path led, 38 years later, to the desk here in the Humanities building where I’m typing this entry. Suffice to say that I didn’t want to leave Paris and, in fact, would have preferred going back to Madrid for another year of teaching. Sometimes I still wish that door had not closed.

Returning to Spain then was not possible, which made the moment poignant, unforgettable. Had the option existed, I probably would not sharply recall every moment of that last day in the French capital.

So, graduates, some advice: talk a slow, bittersweet walk around campus, ear-buds out, phone tucked away. Just look at all the places where you built memories in four years. The next 34 years will fly by.

This blog will continue in the summer months, so send words and metaphors of interest 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 source: Nathan Gibbs at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Insipid

Some time back, during my rip through the R.W.B. Lewis biography of Edith Wharton, I covered the word fatuous. Our pick this week, also one Wharton employed, could be first cousin to that word. Fatuous means something silly or stupid. Wharton found much of modern life (and fiction) fatuous, insipid, or both. Truly, both words walk down the decades hand in hand.

Our word should bring to mind, to those with decent vocabularies, a bowl of very thin soup. Such a dish possesses more flavor than hot water, but the result tastes thin and lacking, quickly leading to an empty stomach. The OED seconds this culinary linkage, with references dating back to the early 17th Century, coming to us via French via the Latin insipidus.

Sometimes, silliness and blandness are not twins. For many first-years, their writing strikes me not as fatuous, because most of them work in earnest to prove themselves in college. Yet often the results too often prove insipid, featuring too many verbs of being, limited vocabularies, generalizations or superficial claims not original to themselves. I do scold them a bit, but mostly my work involves getting them to hear how insipid (and boring) the prose appears. They don’t care for their first grades of C or even B-, but there it stands. Too much writing we read remains insipid, as uninspired as the work Wharton disliked.

Frequency for our word has not been common since the days of tricorn hats, when it enjoyed about eight times the use we see today. Insipid writing, however, never went away. I suppose common terms such as “bland” or the more interesting “voiceless” have filled the void. “Tasteless” does not mean, except literally, much about food. When used metaphorically, it can mean crude or vulgar or, well, fatuous.

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 source: “Clear Soup” by dielok at Flikr. That soup looks excellent, not insipid!

Word of the Week! Nostrum

My students training to be Writing Consultants recently conducted an experiment in class. They traded papers with a partner and held a writing conference. Then they employed both Grammarly and Chat GPT 4.0 to see what sort of commentary these pieces of software would provide.

Results varied but one commonality emerged: software tends to dispense generally positive-sounding but generic advice such as “be sure you integrate all the sources well” or “check the first sentence of each paragraph to be certain it connects to the final idea in the paragraph before.”

Well, duh. Teaching students to prompt-engineer their questions to an AI helps, but meanwhile, thanks for the nostrums, ChatGPT. I gave one student that word, one I knew but have rarely have used. I suspect that soon I’ll be using this word too much.

What is a nostrum? Where did it come from? And why is it related to our photo of “polite soothing syrups”?

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary quotes a famous writer for a usage example, “Whether there was real efficacy in these nostrums, and whether their author himself had faith in them, is more than can safely be said,” wrote 19th-century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, “but, at all events, the public believed in them.”

A nostrum in our modern sense can still mean a dubious medical cure; several nostrums were hyped at the highest levels of government as preventatives for COVID-`19, with a few fatal and un-prosecuted outcomes. Typically, we instead call these sorts of pharmaceutical scams “snake oil” or just “quackery.” Yet a soothing word or phrase that means little of substance can still go by “nostrum,” especially if otherwise they do not harm a patient.

In terms of origins, our obviously Latin word has an interesting backstory. From my favorite online etymology source, I leaned that current usage dates to about 1600, so again we have a Renaissance term from that era’s renewal of interest in Classical texts for secular learning. You’ll also find many good synonyms for our word at this site, so I highly recommend it. I think I found the origin of the Spanish cura, meaning priest or a cure, there. We have a link to the historically medical (as well as their typically spiritual) cures that clergy brought to folks in earlier times.

I’d heard of the Roman name for the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum, our sea. And so it was for centuries. That fact must have been soothing to Romans who could live near the coast without fear of dark enemy sails appearing on the horizon!

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 Source: public domain image from Picryl

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.

Metaphor of the Month! Hobson’s Choice

By Leo Barnes

Editor’s note: I’m delighted to get a suggestion and post from Leo. I invite other student readers to send me words and metaphors. I appreciate Leo’s mention of Joseph Heller’s amazing novel, one that used to be read widely on college campuses and would merit reading again in these times.

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines Hobson’s Choice as an apparently free choice that in reality is more like an ultimatum. The word comes from a British 17th-century stable owner named Thomas Hobson from Cambridge. Hobson was a courier with a large stable of horses he would rent out to university students looking to go riding or visit nearby London.

He noticed that all the students only wanted to ride his best horses while the rest got no use at all. This was problematic. His most popular horses were being overworked while the rest were becoming deconditioned. Hobson fixed this by devising a system where he’d switch the horses everyday from stall to stall on a planned circuit. The horse nearest the stable entrance — and only that horse — was what Hobson would rent to students for that day. Students had the choice of that horse or no horse at all.

portrait of Thomas Hobson — Thomas Hobson, by Unknown artist (1629)

What comes to mind when I think of Hobson’s Choice is Joseph Heller’s hilarious book Catch-22. The story takes place during the second World War where Milo Minderbinder — the squadron mess officer — gives his fellow servicemen a choice that’s not a choice at all:

“[Milo] raised the price of food in his mess halls so high that all officers and enlisted men had to turn over all their pay to him in order to eat. Their alternative, there was an alternative, of course—since Milo detested coercion, and was a vocal champion of freedom of choice—was to starve.”

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 credits: Ἰάσων at Flickr for horses, Wikipedia for image of Thomas Hobson.

Word of the Week! Trove

I use this word a bit but have never covered it before. Or uncovered it: that may be closer to its meaning.

As someone who follows space-related news regularly, if not obsessively, I came across “trove” in this story about the comet Ryugu. The example from the piece shows common usage: “These samples are proving to be a veritable trove of information, not just about Ryugu but about broader solar system processes.”

I figured there would be a link to the French verb trouver meaning “to find,” since one thinks of treasure-hunters finding a trove of ancient gold or artifacts. The older use of our word got paired always with “treasure,” predating the solitary use of “trove” by several centuries.

The OED entry on this week’s word does not trace the link to trouver, but a page at the Linguistics stack-exchange does, going back even further, “The French verb. . . can trace its ancestry back to the Greek word τρόπος, which means a turn, manner, style, or figure of speech.” So we turn things up in a trove.

Our little comet doesn’t look like it would turn up much, does it? We are not looking at solid gold. Ryugu’s real trove, however, is knowledge: we may have found a means by which early life emerged on our planet, through cometary bombardment with materials essential to, well, creating us and all life around us. Sobering thoughts for late winter, as plant-life begins to re-emerge from its nap?

Update: I made a few changes today, armed with coffee, to differentiate “trove” from “treasure trove.”

If you have a word or metaphor you enjoy, send them 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 credits: Treasure trove from Bad Sassendorf-Herringsen and comet Ryugu courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Inclement

Stormy skies, Kenmare, Ireland 2011

This time of year, we run the risk of inclement weather; conditions get so bad that we might have to delay opening the campus or even close things down for that business day.

So when the weather is dandy, why do we not speak of “clement” weather?

Our word has old roots, the Latin inclementem. A quick translation reveals “cruel,” something I don’t ascribe to a funnel-cloud. It’s simply indifferent to us and our desires, falling on rich and poor, young and old alike. Then again, we love to personify weather: bitter cold, into the teeth of the gale, the pitiless sun or, more happily, gentle breezes and rain.

Studying the OED entry, we find consistent usage from the 1600s. An 1621 example got used, ironically, for a human being, in “Pope Clement the fift, [fifth] was inclement and cruell.”

Our word of the week enjoys a frequency band of 4, meaning it occurs between .1 and 1 times per million words in modern English. Usage peaked at 1.2 per million words after 1810, beginning to taper after 1840. A minor uptick occurred after 2010.

Back to “clement” for a moment, meaning “mild or human in the exercise of power an authority; merciful, lenient, kindly” and associated with those in power. The OED cites an earlier first use than for its antonym, late in the 15th Century. Though it too has a frequency band of 4, the use of “clement” never rose above .6 per million, and today it hovers at just under .2. Weather also can be clement, but it’s rarely used to describe mild or gentle conditions. We do often speak of “clemency” when a prisoner is released or a sentence reduced.

I leave it up to the reader to consider if our increasingly inclement weather from climate change drives inclement leadership. I’d like to see both trends reverse.

If you have a word or metaphor you enjoy, send them 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: photo by me, Kenmare, Ireland, 2011: a break in inclement weather!

Word of the Week! Impetuous

This week’s word bears close relation to last week’s metaphor, fast and loose. With its Latinate sound, impetuous remains formal enough for academic prose yet captures, in a few syllabus, a sense of rushing headlong and without due consideration. We have all known impetuous people. Maybe we are that, ourselves!

For both objects and people, our word has meant the same thing for about the same number of years, to act with “rash energy,” as the OED notes. Ocean waves, wind, people who plunge ahead recklessly, even imprudent stock investors can be said to act impetuously. The word implies, in people at least, a variety of passion. Now dear Valentines, hear this: don’t fall in love in an impetuous manner. You will come to regret it! And that’s our link to this week’s holiday.

The word itself comes from the French impétueux. As with so many very useful terms, ours is loan word.

If you have a word or metaphor you enjoy, send them 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 credit: Diana Robinson at Flickr, “Waves Crashing Near Pacific Grove, California.”