Word of the week – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Despondent

It’s okay in these troubled times to feel despondent, as long as. you understand what the word means. I used it the other day in a light-hearted way, when touring Colonial Williamsburg. At the Governor’s Palace, two cooks were preparing a Colonial-era meal. The food smelled wonderful, and I said I’d like some. “Sorry, Sir,” came the reply. “It’s for the Governor’s table.”

I told the woman that I, a mere commoner, felt despondent.

“Nice choice of word!” she answered, without feeding me. I informed her that at least we had filled my belly with a word for this week.

For once, The OED entry on our word proves very brief, giving good definitions related to “loss of heart or resolution,” or simply being depressed. I find it depressing that the entry provides no examples of usage newer than 1849. How could such a useful word fall out of favor? Do we simply say “depressed” nowadays?

The word is of Latin origin, from dēspondēntem, with frequency of use falling markedly until about 1980, when despondent enjoyed (if that’s the term for it) an uptick in use. The Gay 1890s proved a paradoxically high-water mark, and now we are back about to 1960 in use of our word.

We need synonyms for unpleasant things. Saying “I’m down” or “I’m bummed out” do not work in formal prose. So cheer up! Even if I didn’t make you feel better, at least I’ve given you an new word for feeling bad.

Send me words and metaphors, uplifting or depressing, at jessid-at-richmond-edu or by leaving a comment below.

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

Image: Man probably looking at S&P 500 since January. Creative-Commons image from freestockphotos.biz

Word of the Week! Supine

Hard to think that this word, another I found in the work of Edith Wharton, has not yet appeared as a Word of The Week. So what do we know about “supine”?

The OED notes its Latin origin, to lie face upwards. The dictionary records earliest uses to the 15th Century, making it again a Gutenberg word. Printing simply made available a term already in the vocabulary of educated folk.

I thought of being supine as merely lying down, or for one of Wharton’s characters, collapsing upon a fainting couch.

To be truly supine, however, not just any sort of fainting will do. One must face upward, as in the final pose of Yoga practice, savasana or “corpse pose.”

Figuratively, as the OED entry also notes, our word can mean disinclined to act, from laziness, fear, greed, or some other motive. Here I’ve heard our word used to describe the current Congress, supine before a leader with authoritarian intentions.

When will they wake up? I thought that I had covered “Quisling” here before; perhaps that one will be a Metaphor of the Month soon. We shall see if events warrant that frightening word.

Send me words and metaphors at jessid-at-richmond-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! Screed

Thanks to reader Marissa Sapega, who teaching Business Communications at the university, for this word. Looking back at older entries, I have used our word exactly once. I’m certain, however, that my occasional op-eds elsewhere have included a screed or two.

As defined by my printed copy of The Random House Dictionary, a screed means a diatribe, usually not a short one. We associate these features with screeds: ignoring reactions, not listening to an audience’s needs, writing from rage or some other passion. Screeds do not mean reasoned discourse, but a long harangue. Screeds rant in writing, usually. I’ve heard the term “verbal harangue” a few times, so that word needs unpacking in a future post as the word “harangue” also implies something written.

In any case, I just provided with you with a few useful synonyms for screed.

An older use could mean an informal letter, but we do not hear that much any longer. The only other use for the word I know is a straightedge for smoothing the top of concrete or cement. I have one of those screeds in our barn.

This week’s word has interesting roots: Etymology Online cites the Middle English shrede, with became our modern “shred,” meaning a small piece of something larger. As a verb, shred relates nicely to today’s screed: screeds can shred the listener’s eyes and ears.

We live in a time of screeds. I won’t lie to you, or give you a screed, but language in politics, in particular, scares the hell out of me because it portends, even promises, violence. No wonder my younger students are always anxious.

How we get back from rage to reasoned discourse cannot be solved by this blog. Each of us, however, can do our parts to end what I see as madness, the sort that rips a civilization to pieces: shredded, or screeded, to death.

An ironic coda: Hipsters in New York City are now buying shredded clothes at very high prices, and I do not mean the silly pre-shredded jeans I see undergrads wear. These clothes have screeds acquired by hard use of the sort I subject my farm-clothing to. You can read more about the weird fad at this NYT story.

Sign of the times? I plan to find one of the shops when the fad hits Richmond, then sell them my worst cast-offs.

Send me words and metaphors at jessid-at-richmond-edu or by leaving a comment below.

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

Image: Creative-Commons image, modified, from publicdomainpictures.net

Word of the Week! Inure

This week’s word crops up enough in academic prose that we need something on it. I do not frequently use our word, but I like it for one specific reason.

Even a casual check at free dictionary sites reveals that “inure” can carry two very different meanings: to take effect (often in business or legal usage); to become accustomed to something, usually something unpleasant.

I’m inured to the difficult process of walking on ice, for instance (hint: cleats for those winter boots). It’s not a pleasant task. That said, I love cold weather, so there’s no need for me to be inured to that. For others, bundle up and stop complaining.

As for using the word correctly, it’s a transitive verb so it needs an object. Note how the “to” can move about. I love this 1837 example from the OED, using a spelling I’ll discuss in a moment: “To enure youths to habits of industry.” We did, then, have Slackers in the early 19th Century. Call Mister Bumble and make the kid Oliver do something useful!

The OED notes a 15th-Century date of first recorded use and an etymology native to English but “by derivation.” Have a look here for more on that particular puzzle. There’s another: The OED favors the spelling “enure,” whereas other sources favor “inure.” I tend to see the second spelling more often. Pick your poison but be consistent, please. At a site called Daily Writing Tips, the author notes that “enure” tends to enjoy pride of place for legal writing. I don’t know but any attorneys or Professors of Law, please let me know.

Inure yourselves to this blog continuing all year, when I have a word you don’t like. So why not instead send me words and metaphors by leaving a comment below or by email at jessid-at-richmond-dot-edu ?

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

Image Source: Scott Perry at Flickr

Word of the Week! FOMO

I know, it’s an acronym. Yet a timely one. Do you have “fear of missing out?”

Not me. FOMO is not part of my curmudgeonly life: I almost always see hit movies and TV series years later, don’t watch TV except one hour a week max. I leave my phone silenced, without even a buzz. I don’t give out my phone number, even to my employer. If I don’t know a number in “recents” I block it. I call it my “Love of Missing Out.” LOMO!

So where did FOMO come from? Faith Hill’s article in The Atlantic Monthly (YES, monthly again) gives us her ideas on genesis of our term, “author and speaker Patrick McGinnis coined the term.” I think she needs to say more, as McGinnis explored the idea in the early 2000s and gave it a name, but naming is not always claiming.

The Wikipedia entry and the site cited by Hill note that the “phenomenon was first identified in 1996 by marketing strategist Dr. Dan Herman, who conducted research and published an article in The Journal of Brand Management.” The Wikipedia page compares FOMO to the older “keeping up with the Joneses,” a Postwar phrase.

Hill ends up praising her FOMO tendencies, while admitting:

This is no way to live, you might be thinking. FOMO tends to be described as a dark impulse, something that keeps you from being present as you worry instead about what better option could be around the corner, or scroll miserably through the online evidence of what fun everyone is having without you.

You follow her breadcrumbs to the source, which notes how the fear can be part of anxiety disorder, the most common invisible disability on our campus.

And my students wonder why I call phones “dopamine dispensers.” Dr. Essid’s prescription is an close as your thumbs: ignore celebrities, Doomscrolling, and what comes out of some politicians’ always-open mouths. Ditch binging on TikTok, box scores, and movie trailers. Take out the earbuds and take a walk outside to see real buds already appearing on certain plants.

Build something instead of consuming things. Try some LOMO. You’d find it called JOMO at a Psychology Today article. Lomo can mean “back” in Spanish, though in my experience it meant a cut of meat. So find LOMO by turning your back on FOMO!

Yes, I’m shouting into a hurricane. But I can help a few of you lose that FOMO, part of my life’s work is done. Of course, here I am, seeking eyeballs on a blog and the dopamine hit I get when you tell me that you read it.

Just don’t call me to say so. Harumph. Time to step outside.

If you think of any words or metaphors to share with the community in 2025, send them to me by postcard, telegram, smoke-signal, pony express, signal rocket, 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.

WONDERFUL image by Kevin Hodgson at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Albeit

What a pleasant surprise to learn, from The OED’s frequency chart, that one of my favorite words for formal writing has enjoyed increased usage since 1950. The term sounds impressive. Could the uptick come from legal usage? In a Stackexchange discussion of the word, one writer notes that “many people consider it archaic.”

Not me. I like archaic, even while getting generative AI to make an image for me. I also think of John Houseman in The Paper Chase, lecturing formally.

Maybe I show off when I write that the word “possesses a certain gravitas, albeit one that might alienate general readers.” Guilty as charged; an education means a hard-earned journey, and when writing for other specialists, yes, I’ll trot out my Latin and my albeits. The etymology, however, proves as rudimentary as all+be+it.

In my example above, my usage matches the first definition given by The OED, “even though.” The term can mean “in spite of,” as well. You can read other definitions here. I recommend our word for adding some variety to formal written work. One gets tired of “even thoughs,” even though that term proves easy to understand.

I close with a bit of advice for this week. Make your stylistic choices wisely, albeit boldly.

If you think of any words or metaphors to share with the community in 2025, 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 source: Google Gemini AI to prompt “Close-up image of an elderly white male law professor lecturing while holding up an index finger” (to avoid other fingers and other meanings)

Word of the Week! Querulous

Hello, 2025.

My first retirement-era word relates, in my brain, to old age. It means to complain in a high-pitched voice. Sounds like a great deal of the Internet, doesn’t it?

I’m not here to complain. I’d like, first, to thank all of you readers who came by for my retirement reception. It humbled me to meet so many of you. Who the heck reads blogs these days?

Some of you. So thank you. I am not fully retired, however; I will be teaching a graduate course, “Writing With and About AI” for our School of Continuing Studies. AI will undoubtedly give us many new words and metaphors, but let’s stick to the Simpsons’ character yelling at a cloud. How did the word get associated with one’s “golden years”?

Etymology Online notes connections we might guess, to words such as “quarrel” with some rather old roots, “from Old French querelos ‘quarrelsome, argumentative’ and directly from Late Latin querulosus, from Latin querulus ‘full of complaints, complaining,’ from queri ‘to complain.’ ”

My notes about the word say “NB Wharton,” meaning “nota bene the novelist Edith,” one of my favorite writers. If I recall correctly, she used the word a bit in her works but her biographer R.W.B. Lewis also described her as being rather querulous in her later years.

I suppose if one must complain, it must be stated clearly, not weakly. Perhaps that’s our link to elderly mumble-grumbling? Who is listening, at that point? I plan on none of that, thank you.

May your voices be strong, not querulous, as you make yourselves heard. Our word has, after a long decline in usage, doubled in frequency since 2010. Good or bad? We can chat about that while getting senior discounts on coffee.

If you think of any words or metaphors to share with the community in 2025, 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.

Word of the Week! Resilience

Thanks to Dr. Bill Ross, in Mathematics, for nominating what looks to be our Final Word of 2024, though I may well squeeze in another before New Year’s Day. I use this one, or its common synonym, “grit,” frequently with my anxious students. Their training as Writing Consultants includes a unit on “failure as teacher.” Many of them have never encountered the idea and being young, they falter at small reverses that older folks often take in stride.

No, I’m not ordering them off my lawn and I do not think them weak. They simply lack experience. I did tell a rather shocked, hovering parent once “my philosophy is to let students stumble a bit, but to be there with a helping hand when they start to fall.” Thus a human acquires resilience. I know of no other method.

Our word is an old one, though it only acquired its modern sense in the 19th century, coming from the meaning of anything that proves “elastic” or able to rebound. The OED entry provides an 1807 first use in scientific parlance to express elasticity, with 1626 as first use for a physical recoiling from something. Though the latter is an obsolete usage, we still talk about “snapping back” after setbacks in our lives.

I’d like to know what words for this virtue appeared in ancient times, when one learned to be resilient fast, the alternative being not growing up at all. The OED’s entry cites an uncertain etymology, “Probably of multiple origins. Probably partly a borrowing from Latin,” perhaps “combined with an English element.”

How resilient is our word to linguistic change? Since 1970, frequency of use has nearly tripled. We talk about resilience, at least; that’s a start toward embodying it as well as designing our built world for resilience.

May your holidays be stress-free and your vocabularies interesting. Send me more words and metaphors for 2025 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: “Resilience” by Chris Campbell at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Hoary

We had our first killing frost last week, a full month later than usual in Goochland County. We did not, however, have hoarfrost.

The word “hoary” sounds ancient, and as we shall see, it became related with being ancient or, nowadays, overused and hackneyed. Go back far enough, and we have the Old English har, meaning old, venerable, or gray.

My recent post about garden hermits touched upon one aspect of hoariness: the “ornamental hermits” of wealthy landowners in Georgian England were expected to wear long white beards. The facial hair and their owners get described as “hoary” by many visitors to the garden hermitages.

We can see from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s slew of definitions that “white with age” comes up again and again with our word, though more recently, “hackneyed” or “worn out” have taken pride of place.

As for “hoarfrost”? We rarely see it in Virginia, though during a few very cold Indiana winters when I was in graduate school, it occurred from time to time. I’d get up before dawn in hunting season to see wire fences and branches festooned with long streamers of frost.

This article provides a nicely written overview and some amazing images of the phenomenon, often occurring near bodies of water, when on “cold, clear, and windless nights with low humidity, when the rapid radiant heat loss from surfaces causes water vapor–not liquid water droplets, as in fog–to form delicate, needle-like crystals on those surface.”

I adore cold weather. I could look at that writer’s images of frost all day long. Florida is for the rest of you. Bring on the hoarfrost.

I hope your holidays are warm (indoors) and seasonal (outside). The blog, full of words hoary and new, will continue all winter and into the months I don’t like so well.

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: LadyDragonfly at Flickr

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.