When checking to see if I’d featured this useful term before, I found FOUR pages of entries that contained “nuance” in the text but none that gave it a starring role. Time to fix that! Clearly, I love this word.
Frankly, I love anything nuances. You may know my hatred of the Superhero genre of film: I can tell you the plot after 10 minutes for most of them. Boring! They contain some clever dialogue but little mystery or surprise: those are the soul of nuanced stories.
So few things in our world–whatever zealots of any stripe say–are binary. Instead, we encounter subtle shades of differences, slightly varying experiences, a spectrum of personalities, not a series of pigeon-holes. Just put down the phone some twilight and watch a sunset unfold. No two are identical.
The Online Etymology Dictionarynotes the origin of our word, “slight or delicate degree of difference in expression, feeling, opinion, etc.,” 1781, from French nuance “slight difference, shade of color.”
And there we have it. Now get out of your chair and enjoy some nuanced experiences outdoors as Spring unfolds. They are as close on the UR campus as a stroll around Westhampton Lake as the leaves unfurl.
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Being an academic includes, believe it or not, a measure of humility. So when I covered this term here before, I wrote “my money, as well as Wikipedia’s, is on Barney Google, a nearly forgotten cartoon character. ”
I may have lost that bet. There’s some evidence that Barney’s popularity led to a shift in an existing term.
While doing some research on sites to visit in Northumbria, in service of a long-term plan to walk the Hadrian’s Wall Path, I came across the legend of The Lambton Worm, a crawling horror dispatched by local nobleman, Sir John Lambton. As a lad he went fishing and caught the creature, when it too was a youngster. He disposed of the strange “fish” by tossing it in a well, and trouble followed. You may recall the legend if you saw Ken Russell’s B-movie adaptation of Bram Stoker’s reportedly awful novel, The Lair of the White Worm.
I hope to visit the scene of these adventures, south of Newcastle, when I begin my rambles across the north of England. As for my evidence that I was wrong earlier about googly eyes? Doubts began when I found a folk-song composed in 1867 by Clarence M. Leumane, and I’ll quote part of it here, after Sir John unwisely tosses the baby worm down a well:
But the worm got fat an’ grewed an’ grewed, An’ grewed an aaful size; He’d greet big teeth, a greet big gob, An greet big goggly eyes.
The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that our “googly eyes” comes from the older “goggly eyes” of the song, and, further back, to the 1530s and Middle English.
Sorry Barney Google, our term is far older than you. Perhaps Barney’s pop-eyed look helped morph “goggly-eyes” to “googly-eyes”?
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Here’s a word of common parlance with an interesting etymology. We think of shuffling cards or perhaps walking slowly along, dragging our feet. Both meanings exist alongside each other and pose no problems for native speakers of English. My gut instinct told me that the sliding motion of cards when shuffling them (unlike cutting a deck of cards) gives us a hint of the origin.
The Online Etymology Dictionary provides both the “Middle English shovelen “to move with dragging feet,” and well as a possible “Low German schuffeln ‘to walk clumsily, deal dishonestly.’ ” That latter meaning gives us a possible link to the noun “shuffle,” which can be a trick or deceit.
At last, I know what was on the minds of the geniuses at Warner Brothers who created my favorite deep-fried Southern trickster and foil for Bugs Bunny, Colonel Shuffle. He’s a thin-skinned Southern aristocrat in a few cartoons, including the memorable “Mississippi Hare,” with Bugs getting the best of Shuffle at every turn, leading to one of the finest lines in cartoon history when Shuffle is shoved over the side of a riverboat, “Why did you dunk my poor old hide in Ol’ Man River?” Shuffle appeared elsewhere, usually as the butt of jokes rather than playing them, try as he might.
Shuffle is descended from not only Mark Twain’s King and Duke but a long series of picaresque characters that came before the Civil War. When Shuffle declares that he is “the rip-roarin’-est, gold-diggin’-est, sharp-shootin’-est, poker-playin’-est riverboat gambler on the Mississippi!,” he uses boasts we associate with Davy Crockett, Sut Lovingood, Simon Suggs, and other real and fictional “ring-tailed roarers” of Southern-frontier history and tall tales. All of them were expert at playing tricks and pulling cons on gullible strangers.
Good thing they never shuffled their cards around Bugs Bunny, Doc.
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Our trivia team, “Electric Mayhem,” got stumped by this word this week, so I decided I’d cover it.
Our trivia-host stated that he wanted a term that came from the Italian word “to babble” for a type of confidence man. We wrote down this week’s word, but we figured that the origin of our word was French, so we erased it. We’d have still lost that round, and so it goes.
Like “Montebank” that I’ve covered here before, this week’s work is of Italian parentage yet it shares French roots as well. I’ll use the same image. Whereas Montebank comes from the monta in banco, “to stand on a bench” TO sell that snake-oil, “Charlatan” has a more complex etymology. From The Etymology Dictionary Online:
“one who pretends to knowledge, skill, importance, etc.,” 1610s, from French charlatan “mountebank, babbler” (16c.), from Italian ciarlatano “a quack,” from ciarlare “to prate, babble,” from ciarla “chat, prattle,” which is perhaps imitative of ducks’ quacking.
Today we have charlatans online, promising us miracles. We have others in positions of great power. We have many who blog. I hope this post, at least, might babble a bit but present you with an accurate origin on a still-popular word.
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Image of “Professor Thaddeus Schmidlap, resident snake-oil salesman at the Enchanted Springs Ranch and Old West theme park” courtesy of Wikipedia, via the Library of Congress.
Blizzard conditions rarely appear in this part of the Mid-Atlantic, but one never knows. My undergrad students, who too often live their lives from day to day (ah, youth) don’t check the weather. They may wish to cast an eye on the forecast this weekend. While we may not get an epic fall of snow, we might get wind and very low temperatures.
Some will call that a blizzard. I would not. I “enjoyed” blizzard conditions exactly once, trying to drive a car ill equipped (’77 Volare, if I recall) that belonged to other folks from Bloomington, IN to Edwardsville, IL. The Interstate was coated with snow, which for a rear-wheel drive car wasn’t too bad. The wind was so strong, however, that it moved us around and created whiteout conditions. At 20mph or so, it took is all day to reach our destination.
What is a blizzard, technically? Etymology Online, where I went for the history of the word, has it as a “strong, sustained storm of wind and cold, and dry, driving snow,” which could described what we see from Saturday into Sunday in Virginia. The term is of American origin, with its sense of snowfall dating to 1859. Older uses of the term, perhaps related to the comfy term “blaze” appeared earlier, meaning ” ‘a violent blow,’ also ‘hail of gunfire’ in American English from 1829, and blizz “violent rainstorm” is attested from 1770.”
My wood stove is blazing as I write this, though the fire brings comfort, not fear. We heat with wood on the farm and have a furnace as backup, yet I suppose I need to make some blizzard plans soon. That won’t include going to the supermarket. I suspect they are already being raided by shoppers in a blind panic.
Come what may stay warm, and go outside only to enjoy the hiss of falling snow, the silence that follows, and the joy of sliding down a hill on a sled. I plan to do all of them.
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Creative-Commons image of The Flatiron Building, NYC, courtesy of Thinking Humanity.
Hello, 2026 Spring Semester. I’m not teaching this term, as I edit an anthology of essays about AI’s impact upon writing classrooms, programs, and centers. It will certainly generate more words for this blog.
Meanwhile, let’s look at a term that I use a bit, but whose origin came from before my time. I didn’t know the etymology until ran across a reference in David Michaelis’ outstanding biography of Charles M. Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts. The famous cartoonist’s career briefly overlapped that of H.T. Webster’s The Timid Soul, a strip that gave the world a meek protagonist, Caspar Milquetoast. When Charlie Brown is at his Charlie-Browniest, there’s a bit of Caspar in his humiliation. You can read more about Webster’s comic series here.
For several decades, timid people were called milquetoasts, after Casper.
The character’s name comes from milk-toast, a dish we don’t see much these days. It’s a bland concoction of toasted bread soaked in milk, perhaps sweetened or seasoned mildly. More for you! Having just made some spoonbread, which I do find wonderful, that’s as bland and inoffensive as I need while I still have teeth in my skull.
We no longer frequently hear this week’s word, one that qualifies as a neologism or newly coined word, alas. “Wimp” has taken its place. The OED has two instances of it being spelled “milktoast” with the same meaning. Unusually for that dictionary, I couldn’t find a frequency-of-use chart; it’s hiding behind a tree somewhere, like Mister Milquetoast.
Pop-culture icons come and go, but sometimes they leave us a word. I covered googly eyes here some time ago; cartoon character Barney Google gave us that one. I do wonder what linguistic influences Peanuts will leave us in a few decades? I do sometime see damaged or deformed Christmas trees marked as “Charlie Browns” at reduced prices.
Please do not be a milquetoast or a Charlie Brown. Put your googly eyes to work and send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!
See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.
Image: Caspar M tries not to give offense, even to a sign on the wall.
I came across our word in an essay about the life and work of Wilfred Thesiger, whose book The Marsh Arabs I’m now reading. I knew it means a corruption of another’s writing, but I’d forgotten the etymology. It’s not a word I use frequently, so I needed a refresher.
One nice thing about our word involves its straightforward etymology as a neologism, though one from the early 19th Century. Here’s the complete entry from Merriam Webster Online:
In 1807, a new edition of the works of William Shakespeare hit the scene in England. Titled The Family Shakespeare, the collection of 20 of the Bard’s plays in four volumes was at first anonymously edited, and promised in its preface to “remove every thing that could give just offence to the religious or virtuous mind.” Though the sanitized project later became a public sensation (and a source of literary derision) after its expanded, ten-volume second edition was published in 1818 and credited solely to physician Thomas Bowdler, the original expurgation was in fact the work of his older sister Henrietta Maria “Harriet” Bowdler, an accomplished editor and author. Within a year of the younger Bowdler’s death in 1825, bowdlerize had come to refer to cutting out the dirty bits of other books and texts—testimony not only to the impact of his eye for impropriety, but to those of his sister Harriet as well, though her efforts were obscured by history, if not technically bowdlerized.
How many other less famous works have been “cleaned up” by survivors or literary executors? It’s a form of posthumous censorship, generally, though I think of a pop-culture example where the creators were very much alive. When the Rolling Stones appeared on Ed Sullivan’s variety show in 1967, they had to change the lyric “let’s spend the night together” to “let’s spend some time together” and if you can stomach the stupid commercials at YouTube, you can still enjoy Mick Jagger’s eye-rolling when he sings “time.”
Bowdler lives. Damn it. There, I cursed, using the very word that proved so infamous when Clark Gable uttered it in 1939, for Gone With the Wind. At Wikipedia, you can read about the controversy. It took a revision of the Production Board’s code to permit two banned words, “hell,” and “damn” into films.
Today we’ve thankfully moved far from those times, though have we gone too far? Students drop profanities like Autumn leaves as they walk across campus and, for that matter, we have a Presidential Administration full of people who curse like drunken sailors.
I love creative cursing, but I’m trying to bowdlerize my speaking habits. It’s *&%ing hard to do! This Thanksgiving, let’s be thankful for every curse we avoided in 2025 and keep that good habit going.
Wait. I have a solution. Let’s all curse like Yosemite Sam, nemesis of Bugs Bunny. Endure the commercials again to hear what I mean. No bowdlerizing needed.
Incidentally, you need not spell our word with a capital B.
Send any razza-flappin’, flip-floppin’, flig-flippin’ words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.
Consarn it!
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Image: Jagger, mid-eye-roll screen cap from YouTube.
I had a college roommate who enjoyed learning new words. One day he said “I had a vision while in a fugue state.” He meant that half-awake, half-asleep moment when you might recall a dream to be lost by the first cup of coffee.
Fugues in music I knew, and The OED gives us a definition that dates to a first use in the 16th Century, “A polyphonic composition constructed on one or more short subjects or themes, which are harmonized according to the laws of counterpoint, and introduced from time to time with various contrapuntal devices.” You know a fugue when you hear one. They are hard to forget.
What of my roommate’s sense of the word? He was a surf-punk rocker, not Bach. Then we get this definition, just by scrolling down below all that music, “A flight from one’s own identity, often involving travel to some unconsciously desired locality.” This usage dates to 1901 and comes from psychology. You’ll find more on the phenomenon here.
So my roomie was using our word incorrectly; he was aware of himself when in that transition between sleep and alertness and began to keep a dream-journal. Pro tip: If you want to record those visions from sleep, keep a notebook by the bed and scribble down details before you lose them. Artists tend to do these things. Or perhaps some dreams, like fugue states, are best forgotten?
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image: creative-commons image from Lumen Learning.
Monday’s Wordle at The York Times gave me our word. I thought not of the Caribbean dance but of my Catholic upbringing.
I’m a Unitarian-Universalist these days, but I fondly recall tormenting a poor priest with questions that included “who changes all those diapers?” After all, Limbo in Catholic theology is a region of the afterlife where unbaptized infants went. As Catholic schoolboys are wont to do, I asked lots of other questions: where do these babies live? (on clouds) what do they eat? (no need), then, the diaper question (no food, no need for diapers). “Why can’t they just go to Heaven?” got an answer I don’t today recall, something about Original Sin. Religious Studies class (and I) moved on.
Despite press reports several years back, The Vatican has not canceled Limbo but in fact left the concept in…well, Limbo. It remains an unresolved theological theory. You can read about Limbo’s history here, and it includes links to the latest Papal pronouncements.
As this is not a blog on theology, let’s get to the issue at hand: words that move around as if they are dancing the Limbo. I thought the dance and the afterlife shared something. They both involve dangling between two states. In the dance, one hovers between standing and falling backward. For those floating, never-hungry babies, they drift between our word and eternity.
Yet both terms have different origins! They thus are contranyms. For the theological term, our word comes from Latin limbus, edge or border (see our modern academic darling of a word, the overused “liminal”).
The term for a dance may come from limber, to be flexible, of 16th century first recorded use but unknown origin. Mystery upon mystery, today! The first recorded use of Limbo as a part of the afterlife is much older, from the 14th Century as the OED reports.
I danced the Limbo (rather well for pre-Yoga me) in my 30s at a nephew’s wedding reception. Even if you have not tried that, you have certainly felt stranded in Limbo during phone-holds, airport departure gates, or in waiting rooms.
Limbo retains healthy frequency of usage, for those reasons. Consider how common this week’s word is, then get up and shake your body, Senora. It’s what Harry Belafonte advises.
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Image: Screencap by me from the film Beetelejuice, which has both Limbo the place and Limbo the dance. Jump in the line!
In my course “Writing With And About AI” my students have been discussing benchmark testing for large language models and how companies might be “cheating on the tests” by pre-loading the test questions into their AIs. That phenomenon is called “benchmark contamination.”
If proven true for major firms that provide popular models such as Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI, it portends that progress in AI “intelligence” may be greatly exaggerated by those firms as they seek customers and investment capital.
This blog is not about AI per se, but the use of “benchmark” got me thinking of my drill press and shop bench on the farm. Careful measurements matter, so where exactly did “benchmark” come from?
Not the shop bench, as I haphazardly guessed in class. Instead, the OED entry notes that for surveyors’ tools, such “a mark takes the form of a horizontal groove cut in a surface, into which the upper surface of an angle iron would once have been inserted, forming a level surface or ‘bench’ to support a levelling staff.” If you have had the pleasure of looking at the high level of detail on British Ordinance Survey Maps, you will quickly grasp how important a good benchmark proves for careful measurements. First usage recorded is 1826 from the US, during the surveying for the Ohio and Chesapeake Canal, and the etymology remains a simple compound of two common English words.
You may use our word as noun or verb without attracting the fury of grammatical purists. If you do, just tell them “benchmark that!” and wave an angle iron at them.
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When checking to see if I’d featured this useful term before, I found FOUR pages of entries that contained “nuance” in the text but none that gave it a starring role. Time to fix that! Clearly, I love this word.
