Richmond Writing

Metaphor of the Month! Tomfoolery

Fool's Cap

In what seems now ancient history in the year 2019, I covered the metaphor of an April Fool. It is April Fool’s Day as I write this, so I sought about for another foolish word.

So who was Tom? A generic name, equivalent to our “Joe Blow” or “John Q. Citizen,” if we are to believe the etymology given by Merriam-Webster’s Online site. This origin gets repeated by sources found with Google. Thome would have been foolish indeed for his example to endure many centuries. Admittedly, we do still call miserly folks “Scrooges,” but we have Uncle Ebenezer (I played him in our 6th Grade Christmas play) to remind us of Dickens’s original humbugler.

As usual, I sought out the OED for clarity and authority on this matter. Thome Fole was English, right?

Yes indeed. Tom was a common name in Medieval England, and as the OED explains, the earliest recorded examples from the 14th Century likely refer to specific jesters named Tom. I’m reminded of a later Tom, “Poor Tom,” the madman Edgar feigns to be from King Lear. Later, the term simply became generic, with the older spelling “fole,” from the Anglo-Norman foole, becoming our “fool.” And there we have it.

Who else from myth or history has a name that became metaphor? Tyrants, certainly, and dictators. Think of all the “Little Hitlers” since 1945. Consider the many Lincolns who have freed people and scores of Cassandras trying to warn us (though we fools do not listen).

Send words and metaphors, wise or foolish, to me by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Kerf

For the past month, I have been cutting wood with a table saw, a jigsaw, and a compound miter-box saw. I’m a competent if not expert carpenter. So in this age of high prices for materials, I decided that wooden weather-board siding made at home would be cost-effective and beautiful for a porch we turned into a three-season room.

This sounds like my blog about rural life, Tractorpunk, but I’m not going to focus on DIY here, fun though it is. I’m going to focus on a concept and word that merit wider use.

As the photo (thanks, Wikipedia) indicates, a saw-blade removes material as it moves through wood. In carpentry we call that the “kerf” and if one saws hundreds of boards, as I have done, the kerf adds up in big piles of sawdust.

Do readers see the potential for a new metaphor here, one as fresh as the smell of sawdust and far better than that once-wonderful cliche “death by a thousand paper-cuts”?

The OED entry on our word traces it to Old English cyrf, as well as Old Norse a current Icelandic terms; in Iceland a kerfi is a bundle of twigs. All the words refer to a cut, the act of making one, or the result.

If kerf becomes more widely used, I’d use it this way: what gets lost when cuts get made? Thus: “Remind Mister Horrible that laying off these recently hired workers may appear wise, but the long-term kerf will be bad for our bottom line.”

What do you think about kerfs and kerfing? How might this word enjoy wider usage without your losing a finger in a table saw? Seriously. Use new words widely, but don’t use any of the tools I mentioned without a mentor. We cannot fix those kerfs.

Do you have a word or metaphor for this blog? Send them to me by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

Metaphor of the Month! Pyrrhic Victory

We have, for the first time since the 1990s, a European war on. In fact, we have the first since 1945, if one considers the tragedy in the Balkans, after the breakup of Yugoslavia, to be a civil war.

If President Putin triumphs, however, it appears that his victory will be pyrrhic. That metaphor has a long, interesting history but also, as descriptor, it reveals a long past of human suffering.

The adjective pyrrhic denotes an ancient Greek war-dance. Check that etymology at the OED link. In this sense, the term has no related to King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who won a battle against the Romans but at a terrible cost in irreplaceable manpower. Recent examples might include some of Japan’s early victories in World War II. Their navy, in particular, lost aviators who had been some of the best in the world, in 1941. They never replaced them properly, with horrible consequences for their military and civilian population.

Wikipedia lists other examples. The term enjoys use beyond military history; any contest where the winner comes out weaker could be labeled a Pyrrhic Victory. Consider this example from 1998, in the OED entry on pyrrhic as adjective:

For the Chancellor who has been running Germany for 16 years, pushing through the euro could be pyrrhic.

That entry also has a great deal about our metaphor, including a first usage in the 17th Century.

Any victory that the Russian President and his circle of minions achieve may be added to the list of nation-breaking victories. I’d prefer peace, with honor for Ukraine, and without more bloodshed. Right now, however, that prospect appears remote.

Do you have a word or metaphor for this blog? Send them to me by e-mail (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

Image of Battle of Santa Cruz courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Hiatus

If you wonder where this blog has been, it’s been stuck in my head while I lay in bed with COVID-19.

Folks, you don’t want to get it. Really. My recovery to full strength is going to take weeks.

Thus, the hiatus.

And what is this odd-sounding word? And why don’t we have other words in the language that sound like it?

The etymology proves straightforward enough. As The OED has it charted out, we have a Latin loan-word. Scholars of the language, please send me other homonyms that came across intact.

As for meaning, it’s a gap. The order of definitions surprises me, as I’ve thought of the gap in chronological terms, as in “between her two terms as mayor, she enjoyed a ten-year hiatus from local politics while leading a local law firm.”

The first definition given, however, involves a break in a material object, as with a hole in a wall. Sounds very odd to say “we crept through the hiatus in the old wall.”

But there it is. If you have other loan-words from Latin that rhyme with this one, send them, as with other words and metaphors of note, 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.

Hole in wall courtesy of Wikipedia. It looks like how I feel.

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

Metaphors of the Month! Silly Love Songs

Happy Valentines Day. Will you be my Valentine? That itself is metaphor, and you can read about the actual Saint(s) Valentine here. Warning: you will find a severed head in that box of chocolates.

Out of curiosity, and a desire for a week to avoid writing about academic language, I decided to have a bit of fun with love-song metaphors. I ate a lot of saccharine (another metaphor) to give you folks the most overused figures of speech for love and lovers out there.

They say the world is full of silly love songs. So what’s wrong with that? I need to know. I pick on Boomer-Generation artists here, mostly. I don’t listen to formulaic contemporary pop, preferring Americana, indie rock, or old punk and glam. The other type of music I like, electronica, has no words so no metaphors can be found.

Love-and-lover metaphors from Country and Western music (those two types of music played at Bob’s Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers) merit an entire post. I’ll be walking the floor and walking the line over that subject in a year.

Love as controlled substance, and more: Maybe you have been drunk with love, but if you listen to Bryan Ferry, pictured up top, you will find a number of rather disturbing metaphors. The decidedly louche crooner remains one of my favorite musicians, but really. In Ferry’s lyrics, one can be a slave to love, and love is the drug, of course, prescribed and dispensed by his and David Stewart’s “Goddess of Love.”

Come to think of it, a person can have a “bad case of loving you,” and the Doctor of Love can “give you the pill.” That’s right, kids, just call Doctor Love. He is not a mental-health professional, clearly. When Bryan Ferry cries out “love me madly,” there is no cure. That makes sense, if you’ve known someone made insane by love.

Now we are really off to the races (the heart races, naturally) in an open car with Love, who is a stranger, after all. Love hurts, love binds, love wounds, love shines, love is painful (it really hurts a lot) until love is lost. Up to that sad point, one becomes a prisoner of love or a victim of love because love is a battlefield. If you survive, you are singed, because love is like a flame. It burns you when it’s hot.

Love birds provide a gentler metaphor where two hearts beat as one. But wait, we have a bunch more hearts to deal with here. Deep in your heart of gold (Neil Young is still searching for one) you may find a change of heart, and that brings us to all the following metaphors for the embers of love’s once-bright flames, as love grows cold.

Broken Hearts, Etc: I will give Janis Joplin a break because 1) She’s dead and 2) “Piece of My Heart” remains such a great song. Yet the end of a loving relationship, when “you’ve lost that loving feeling,” spawns its own series of cliches (remember: all cliches once were fresh). Love can make one heartsick, or hearts can be stepped on. It’s a matter of the heart, you know, so stop dragging my heart around. A cold-hearted lover may have a heart of stone. Hearts can be given away and not returned.

Maybe that is why Warren Zevon, who has more than earned a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, goes out “searching for a heart,” one of his finest songs that somehow makes an old subject sound new, as he moves from a tired cliche to some interesting similes, noting “They say love conquers all / You can’t start it like a car / You can’t stop it with a gun.” I suppose in time those similes might become cliched, too. Or maybe not. Zevon and R.E.M. teamed up as The Hindu Love Gods for a single release, and I don’t see anyone imitating the work from that one-off experiment.

Love Light: I saved the most overused for last. We’ve all seen it, in the eyes of our intended.

Just. Find. A. Fresh. Metaphor. People. We need more than this, Bryan Ferry!

Help me shine a light on interesting 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.

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! Astonished

When I was a UVA undergrad, each of my circle of friends encountered Mallory’s epic Le Morte D’Arthur, and then we ran about using words such as “brain-pan” for skull and the verb “astonied,” for dumbfounded or stunned, as in this sentence:

And therewithal, Sir Uwaine gat his spear in his hand and rode toward Sir Launcelot, and Sir Launcelot knew him well, and so he met him on the plain, and gave him such a buffet that he was astonied, that long he wist not where he was.

Most modern readers should be able to make sense of the passage, noting, for instance, that the “buffet” does not involve all-you-can-eat Cantonese food. Yet only recently did it occur to me that this “astonied” proves to be a linguistic ancestor to our modern “astonished,” a word I’ve long enjoyed.

We have lots of words and metaphors that express surprise: dumfound, stun, amaze, black swan, bolt out of the blue, even ambush. Some of these have negative connotations, but of them “astonish” and “amaze” seemed unalloyed in their sense of something wondrous.

At least until you get knocked off your horse in a joust. So I looked for guidance at the Online Etymology Dictionary, a well-designed, free resource for those without access to The OED. If we reach back to “astonied,” it’s not to lie there on the ground like a stone, but to be thunderstruck (from the Vulgar Latin extonare). From it we got the Old French estoner to cross the Channel in the year 1066, as William The Conqueror split brain-pans and left many Anglo-Saxons astonied by their reversal of fortune.

I would be astonished if more of today’s undergrads went around saying things like “Wit ye well, varlet! My brain-pain hath taken a terrible buffet, and I’m all astonied.” But time marches on, and I don’t know too many who still read Mallory. If I’m wrong, I wist it not, and I’d love to hear from you.

You can send me words and metaphors by having your squire ride with the missive to my castle, 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.

Jousting Knight courtesy of Public Domain Vectors

Word of the Week! Phildickian

This one was nominated by reader Leslie Rose III. It’s time, as the fiction of Philip K. Dick really describes the times we endure.

I have featured a post about J.R.R. Tolkien’s influence and the adjective it generated, as well as other others who have earned that status. Dick merits it; I simply wish “Dickensian” were not already taken, as “Phildickian” does not roll off the tongue. Nor does it seem common enough to appear in dictionaries yet.

That said, let’s look at a blog post with Cory Doctorow’s fine reasoning for why our world is “best viewed through the lens of Philip K Dick (whose books repeatedly depicted a world of constructed realities, whose true nature was obscured by totalitarians, conspiracies, and broken computers) and not Orwell or Huxley, whose computers and systems worked altogether too well to be good parallels for today’s janky dystopia.”

Janky? That needs a post, too, but Doctorow’s reasoning seems spot-on perfect. Why, in the midst of a pandemic, do I get a little paper card from the CDC, something easily forged by paranoid and selfish anti-vaxxer types, proving that I have been inoculated and boosted? Why do that, when the government was perfectly capable of printing a DEBIT card, complete with chip and magnetic stripe, for a handout from a former President’s incompetent administration? Why do some patently insane conspiracy theories, left and right, persist?

Why?

Because we live in a janky dystopia where things are not as them seem. Not the other three types of dystopias outlined in this brilliant piece at Medium. Things break, or we get lied to. Bait-and-switch games abound, even from those we grant great power.

Dick’s fiction hit its apex in the equally janky and run-down 1970s, but today things rhyme with that decade, though we have more dangerous cartoon-figures with totalitarian intent, who may or may not be fully human, waiting in the wings.

Dick was not always the best stylist, since he cranked out prose by the boatload under the influence of paranoia and drug abuse, but his best work should endure. Riley Scott did a good job with the Director’s Cut of the original Blade Runner of capturing Dick’s world. That should help the fiction stay in print.

And perhaps we’ll get a better adjective, if not a less Phildickian world. The irony of this post running on the day we commemorate a great man, Martin Luther King Jr., could not be more revealing of the gap between where we should be and where, sadly, we are.

Be sure to send me words and metaphors of use in academic settings, or merely intriguing, to me 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.

Cover image from Philip K. Dick’s novel The Penultimate Truth.

Word of the Week! Potsherd

The recent snowstorm proven a bit rough for us. It could have been worse, of course. Instead of entire trees coming down, we lost huge limbs as big around as my thigh. They crashed down doing little damage to buildings or objects, save for some terra-cotta planting pots that instantly became potsherds.

You’ve seen them in museums. I discovered recently that our Classics Department now displays several beautiful pieces of pottery in our building; I’m certain they also have drawers full of potsherds. And yet, for the longest time, I called these bits of broken pottery “potshards,” because a shard is a broken bit of something, true?

So, I discovered, is its ancestor, a shoord (Middle English) as well as its even older ancestor, a sceard (Old English). So we are still using a Middle English word, when we say “potsherd.” I suspect, with some resignation, that we all will say “shard” in a century, though I will not be present to hear that change. It has changed before; The OED lists pot-shoord, potsherde, pot sharde (as well as pot-shards) and Spencer’s “potshares” as antique spellings. A round 1800 the spelling settled down, like a sherd under a layer of clay, to our present form.

So when a purist talks about the fallen state of the English language in the time of our dopamine-dispensers also known at smart phones, remind the purist that language has been changing for millennia. Otherwise, when I wished you a Happy New Year, I would say “Glæd Nīwe Gēar Gesǣlig Nīwe Gēar.” Thanks to Omniglot for that translation.

Glæd Nīwe Gēar Gesǣlig Nīwe Gēar, all! Be sure to send me words and metaphors of use in academic settings, or merely intriguing, to me 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.

Creative-Commons image of potsherds courtesy of Wikipedia.