Richmond Writing

Consultant of the Year and Other News

What a fine year it was for our Consultants, both graduating and remaining with us into 2023-24. Here are a few highlights. I’m still getting news, so this update supersedes what I shared in our Spring newsletter.

Consultant of the Year:

Each year faculty nominate a senior for this honor. Dr. Michelle Kahn nominated Janis Parker, who had been nominated once before, as well as receiving kudos from a student she had assisted.

Janis majored in History at Richmond and will be a graduate student and research assistant at Villanova. There she will work on the Last Seen project, an archive of materials from right after the Civil War. Last Seen focuses on recently enslaved people seeking family members from whom they had been separated. You can learn more about the project here.

Consultant Article Accepted for Publication

I encourage students taking Eng. 383, our class that trains Consultants, to submit final reflective essays to WLN’s Tutor’s Column feature. WLN, nearing its 50th anniversary, remains one of the two most influential journals for theory and practice in our field. Several 383 students have sent in articles, but finally we have a forthcoming publication.

Lillian Tzanev’s “A ‘Wise Moron’ Reflects on Academic Writing and Consultancy” explores a sophomore’s attitude toward writing center work before and after taking our class. I will let you know when the piece appears online and in WLN’s print edition.

Lillian will not rest on these laurels; she will soon conduct research in Bulgaria exploring anti-abortion theology in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church..

Other Consultant News

Tanner Brooks will begin his studies at the University of Richmond School of Law. Furthermore, he will be a lead member of the campaign staff for a Virginia State Senate race this summer into early fall.
Susannah Carter will do research with Dr. Rick Mayes about the physician shortage, nurse scarcity, and burnout post-COVID.
Luiza Cocito will be a marketing associate at LinkedIn in New York City.
Molly Earle just accepted an offer with MARKETview here in Richmond, and she will start next month.
Michal Ilouz will be in Richmond this summer to conduct cognitive science research before studying abroad in Melbourne, Australia this Fall.
Jess LaForet and Braden Wixted, as well as Joe Essid and Emily Ball, will be trained in neurodiverse pedagogy by Director of Disabilities Services Dr. Cort Schneider. Jess and Braden will become our first disabilities specialist consultants.
Kaitlyn Garrett will continue her internship with a Richmond area publisher; in October, she will begin an internship as a writer/journalist for Borgen
Brie Grossman will be moving to New York City to work in sales and trading at Barclays.
Allison Ngyuen will be traveling to Europe with family after graduation, before beginning dental school at VCU School of Dentistry in July.
Andrew LaPrade will be joining the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency as a cartographer.
Anna Phillips has received an A&S Summer Research Fellowship to do research at a lab at Tufts University in Boston that studies autism and sexuality/sex education. She is also attending the summer study abroad trip to Perugia, Italy.
Jay Welle will take CPA exams this summer, then move to New York to work in External Audit for PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Word of the Week! Hobo

No, our word this week is not academic. It may, however, turn up in a number of courses in the Humanities or Social Sciences.

When I asked a class last week, no one knew, though one student ventured that it meant a homeless person. In my afternoon class, one student described a person who travels illegally by train to seek temporary jobs. Another gave the stereotype I knew as a child: vagabonds (itself a wonderful word) carrying all their belongings tied in in a rag on the end of a stick.

As historians of the Great Depression could tell us, some Hobos might have been homeless or might have taken to the road by choice. But my concern here is the word, rather than the way of life. Much remains mysterious. We don’t really have a clear etymology for the term, as both the Wikipedia and OED entries demonstrate.

I do know this: my Depression-Era mom warned me and my friend about playing near the railroad tracks because there was a “hobo jungle” there and they might carry us off. To me, in the late 1960s, Hobos were colorful male wanderers with a can of beans over a campfire, dirty and tattered clothing that was once luxurious, and belongings in that famous “bindle” on a stick. In fact, a forgotten synonym for hobo is “bindlestiff,” as the Wikipedia entry notes.

You can learn a great deal about hobos at the Wikipedia page, including a small glossary of hobo slang and a few facts about female hobos. The romanticized idea of the Hobo as a noble wanderer rejecting American standards for success and consumption has been appropriated by the Beat writers, who often traveled with hobos Postwar, and more recently by a very hip magazine.

Finally, give yourself a Hobo name. Mine is “Professor Honest Walker.”

May the yard bulls never knock you around, may you always hop a cannonball and may your Mulligan Stew be delicious. Enjoy your summers. This blog will not go on vacation, so send me words and metaphors worthy of consideration.

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

Image of walking hobos courtesy of Wikipedia. Hobo Jungle courtesy of project XRoads, University of Virginia.

Word of the Week! Eminence Grise

I had never run into this phrase before encountering it, in a story from my course Reading Science Fiction and Fantasy. A student who pays close attention to new words–take heart, there are some!–pointed out the term and we talked about how it functions in the story.

In short, an eminence grise works quietly and decisively behind the scenes rather than serving as a public face for important events. We have a precise origin for our term, in the person of François Leclerc du Tremblay, a monk of the early 17th Century who advised Cardinal Richelieu. Our image, a painting from 1873, shows the respect (and likely fear) this publicly quiet man evoked among powerful French clergy and nobility. Though never a Cardinal (and thus worthy of “Your Eminence”) Tremblay was given that honorific, paired with his gray robes, we get our term.

One rarely sees our phrase, with a usage frequency of 2 (of 8) in the OED editors’ estimation. That’s “0.01 times per million words in typical modern English usage,” so I stand unsurprised that I’ve not met the term before.

“Power behind the throne” comes to mind as a possible synonum here, yet some of these figures have been very public. Another possibility is the word “Svengali,” worth a look in a future post.

Look at any circle of the powerful and influential and you’ll find an eminence grise, sometimes quietly working for good, often not. As usual these days, I asked ChatGPT if something like it might become an eminent grise. Here’s the response:

While it is possible for AI like myself to assist famous and influential individuals in various ways, it is unlikely that AI would become an eminent grise in the traditional sense.

This is because AI is designed to assist humans in performing specific tasks, such as generating text or making predictions based on data. While AI can be very helpful in many contexts, it lacks the complex decision-making abilities and nuanced understanding of human behavior that are often required to wield significant influence behind the scenes.

Would that more of my students wrote a first draft that well, and would that influencers (who do not act behind the scenes) possessed that level of humility.

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.

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.

Metaphor of the Month! Moral Hazard

I try to sneak in words from the world of business here, and today’s metaphor comes just in time, as two banks associated with the Tech Sector have collapsed, or come so close that their assets got seized by the Federal Government.

Today, on my way in to work, I heard the term “moral hazard” associated with banking. I’d more likely consider it a term for a lost weekend in Las Vegas or New Orleans.

Investopedia provides a succinct definition for our metaphor that maps well onto what has happened recently, namely the “risk that a party has not entered into a contract in good faith or has provided misleading information about its assets, liabilities, or credit capacity. In addition, moral hazard also may mean a party has an incentive to take unusual risks in a desperate attempt to earn a profit before the contract settles.”

The entry continues to discuss the lack of consequences faced by the party who breaks faith and, let’s be honest, betrays the others involved. In the cases of our banks, they appear to have either taken on risky investments or engaged in other practices that put depositors’ money at risk.

It’s reprehensible to me, but then my financial advisor ranks me as a moderately conservative investor. I try to keep risks low, at least long-term ones.

So to me, playing with others’ money is immoral. The OED provides an 1875 date of first year, and it emphasizes an outcome rather than initial behavior. The entry cites the insurance industry, where “the effect of insurance on the likelihood of the insured event occurring; the lack of incentive to avoid risk,” which reminds me of the FDIC’s coverage, in theory, of only the first $250,000 in an account. The entry cites a recent example of usage, “Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, a free market think tank, argues that a big financial bail-out would risk creating perverse economic incentives or moral hazard.”

Will unlimited bail-outs of wealthy investors’ deposits create incentives for more risk-taking by new banks? Perhaps.

I’m not Cato-Institute material. I’d prefer we regulate banks tightly and punish more bankers with felony time, not punish the depositors (however wealthy). To me, these courses of action guarantee a moral outcome. Only one banker was jailed after the 2008 financial crisis. Fining banks did not stop what we are seeing today.

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 courtesy of Nick Papakyriazis at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Dungeon

“All those years of Dungeons and Dragons taught me…” begins a hilarious moment of wisdom from the old and often wonderful series The X-Files. Still, what is a dungeon?

The game envisions a dangerous place full of monsters where one can get lost forever. Or in the case of the image above, history teaches of a dreadful below-ground prison where people get put and forgotten. That wretch of a manakin was being gnawed on by a stuffed rat, at Bolton Castle in Yorkshire, when I visited in 2009. The history was horrible but the effect? Monty-Python and Far Side cartoons.I began to wonder about dungeons this week when I asked our Registrar’s office to get me the heck out of a ground-floor classroom with terrible lighting, a loud air-handler that will not stop running, and two tiny windows to natural light that vanish as soon as our overhead-projector screen lowers.

At 9am, such a setting does not bode well for teaching undergrads. We discussed the term in our new room today, and a few students recalled donjon from French. The origin appears (according to the OED entry) Anglo-Norman and first recorded use in the 1300s. Later senses moved the dungeon from a fortified tower (think of the Tower of London) underground, as at Bolton Castle.

In case your mind dove into the gutter, only in our strange current times has the term acquired a sexual connotation. First use in the OED’s reckoning? 1969.

D&D’s dungeons? 1974.

There you have it, dungeon-crawlers (a D&D term for a party of adventurers who descend into the inky, horror-filled depths).

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.

Word of the Week! Embedded

I recently discovered this word, associated with “embedded journalists” during the Afghan and Iraqi wars, used for writing centers. No, we are not battlefields except for ideas and stylistic choices. Yet when we assign a Writing Consultant to a specific class, that employee gets called, at some other centers, “an embedded tutor.”

Seeking clarity for the first use of “embedded” in this sense, I tried The OED, but the dictionary only describes an item fixed inside another, with usage going back to the early 19th Century. Our final arbiter of definitions remains silent about the word, as modern metaphor.

Oxford Reference helps with etymology, giving a date of 2002 for a Pentagon strategy regarding reporters in war zones. Ostensibly the use of reporters attached to a military unit could have protected the non-combatants, yet as Oxford Reference’s entry notes, seconding what I have read in other accounts, at times the act of embedding resulted in journalistic bias, favoring the military or a particular operation.

As this blog does not directly concern itself with journalistic ethics or military affairs, I leave it for the reader to decide. Yet when we make a person part of a team, in an academic sense, can we likewise expect a completely unbiased result? I suspect that reasoning underlies the ex officio status of senior administrators on many academic committees. They step into discussions only when needed.

Where have you encountered our word?

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 courtesy of Craig Duas at Flickr

Word of the Week! Gobsmacked

Any readers from the UK may know this wonderful adjective that first appeared in a 1937 reference, according to the OED. It’s slang, not academic language, but such a colorful term for the more formal “astonished” or “astounded” that I would never correct a writer for employing it.

The gob in question is a mouth. It’s of Scottish origin. If you recall the Monty Python “Argument Clinic” sketch, where a customer accidentally walks into the room for verbal abuse you’ll hear “shut your festering gob” used as one of many insults hurled around. That was my first encounter. Since then, I have heard “gobsmacked” many times in England and Scotland, not so much in Wales (which could be accidental).

Though it suffers from low frequency of use (2 of 8 at the OED) it appeared more in recent trips to the UK. Perhaps it’s simply too colorful to die out, as it expresses the sort of horror you’d experience from a slap to the mouth, delivered out of the blue.

Don’t leave me gobsmacked by telling me this word is bound to die. We need more fun slang like this on both sides of The Atlantic.

Special thanks to Dr. Kate Cassada, UR’s Department of Education, for nominating this word.

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 courtesy of Wikipedia.

Metaphor of the Month! Gordian Knot

Do you think that Alexander the Great cheated when he cut apart a knot that no one else could untie? Or used a different shortcut? Two versions of the story exist. You can read a history of this legend here, but I am more concerned with how an ancient event became a wonderful, if underused, metaphor today.

I encountered Gordian Knot to represent an intractable problem, only later learning it can imply a clever solution as soon soon as the right person shows up.

Remember Rubik’s Cube? It never went away, but at first no one could solve the problem. We had them all around our dorm rooms in the early 80s. Now in contests the cube can be solved in a few seconds. There’s a trick to that, Alexander might say.

Metaphorically, our term has been applied to geopolitics in areas ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The US National Debt (and its ever-rising limit) have been called Gordian Knots, as has human-driven climate change. Some knots got cut (the Soviet/US nuclear-arms standoff) only to be retied recently.

Students will encounter this metaphor in academic work; it hearkens back to a time when Classical metaphors abounded. I came on the scene in the twilight of that era and enjoy classics to this day. Have a look when you can, because these metaphors linger in modern academic prose.

image of work by Jean-Simon Berthélemy courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Volition

This word has a great deal of relevance when we discuss Open AI’s ChatGPT software. That program elicits responses that range from unreasoned panic to pedagogical curiosity among colleagues locally and globally.

We fear, in short, that a machine will replace us.

Yet the AI has no volition. The OED entry defines our word as “An act of willing or resolving; a decision or choice made after due consideration or deliberation; a resolution or determination.” It comes from Latin volo, “I wish” or “I will.”

I decided to ask the AI about this. It replied “No, I am a machine learning model and do not possess volition or consciousness. I can only respond based on the patterns and information in my training data.”

If Strong AI ever develops, it will be able to ask us questions by itself, taking our answers to improve its own code. No developers needed to tweak its 1s and 0s.

Let that give you some comfort, as you are readers endowed with volition, curiosity, and the ability to change the contents of your mind by applying those two marvels. Consider this question put to the AI:

Beatles or Rolling Stones?

The Rolling Stones is a legendary British rock band that formed in 1962. They are considered one of the most influential bands in the history of rock music, and have produced many iconic songs such as “Satisfaction,” “Brown Sugar,” “Start Me Up,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

On the other hand, I’m not aware of any specific references to “Lumpels” as a band, so I can’t make a comparison. Based on this context, I can say that The Rolling Stones is a more well-known and influential band compared to “Lumpels”.

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 Cylon Centurions courtesy of Dr. Gaius Baltar.