Word of the week – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Blizzard

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.

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.

Creative-Commons image of The Flatiron Building, NYC, courtesy of Thinking Humanity.

Word of the Week! Milquetoast

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.

Word of the Week! Bowdlerize

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.

Yosemite Sam Cussing GIFfrom Yosemite Sam GIFs

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!

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: Jagger, mid-eye-roll screen cap from YouTube.

Word of the Week! Fugue

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?

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: creative-commons image from Lumen Learning.

Word of the Week! Limbo

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.

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: Screencap by me from the film Beetelejuice, which has both Limbo the place and Limbo the dance. Jump in the line!

Word of the Week! Benchmark

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.

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: “Mapping a feature” from Wessex Archaeology, via Flickr

Word of the Week! Heteronym

Here’s a partner to contronym that I covered recently; we garnish our salads and enjoy it; if someone garnishes our wages, we don’t.

This week’s work is also first-cousin, intellectually, to synonym, homonym (here and hear), and other oddities of English that so confuse many English-Language learners. It gets weird; “here” and “hear,” our homonyms, sound the same but mean different things. Meanwhile, heteronyms are spelled the same way, have different meanings, and pronounced differently. So here we go!

John liked to row with the team but he got in a row with Mike, who said John rowed too slowly!
Mary was a became advocate for an longer lunch break at the office. She would stop people in the hall to advocate for one-hour lunches and not a moment less!
The delivery drivers took alternate routes to get to the distribution center and they liked to alternate between Ford and Nissan vans, depending on the weather.
Holding up his bow, the violinist took a bow after his performance.

You will find lists for English and Italian at Wikipedia.

There’s no simple answer to why these differences emerged. English pronunciation morphs with, and sometimes, before, spelling changes. Native speakers simply learned both speaking and spelling (one hopes) by practice. Unlike contronyms and homonyms, as well as many figures of speech, “he took the bus” (did he steal it?), and phrasal verbs, “let’s go out! Let’s go to the movies tonight and we’ll go with Rick and Fred,” simply memorizing the context does not help with heteronyms.

Listen, repeat verbally, repeat the practice.

Incidentally, I changed the spelling of “contranym” to the more typical “contronym” at my earlier post, then discovered that they are both acceptable alternate spellings. Maybe I should alternate spellings!

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.

Word of the Week! Prescient

We’ve another loan-word from Latin this week, meaning to have foresight. That power need not be supernatural, but simply the art of seeing ahead often attributed variously to meteorologists, economists, futurists, gamblers, and soon-to-be-lost drivers who overrely on map apps.

All that said, our word can be predictive of certain outcomes. The OED notes in an 1860 usage, “The prescient sadness of a coming and a long farewell.” The person referenced here knows what lies ahead and can predict the emotions the event will stir.

The OED’s frequency chart reveals an interesting phenomenon. Usage dipped from 1880 until about 1950, then began a steady climb that shows no signs of abating. Was that the effect of, first, our inability to predict events such as the Great Depression and the World War that followed it? Then, after that conflict, our living in a time of rapidly advancing technology, where predicting the future became something of a pleasant parlor game?

Speculations about why “prescient” has enjoyed such popularity could itself become a parlor game.

Despite that fivefold uptick in usage from the 50s to the present, some seers of the future get ignored or ridiculed. I need a post about Cassandra.

Sometimes I wonder if some prescience merely means grasping the obvious. As Bob Dylan put it, sometimes “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

I’ve no predictions for the year ahead, as classes resume. Watch the weather and watch the news as much as you can stomach it. Be ready for surprises.

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: Ulysses consults Tiresias 1st century CE from the villa Albani Marble Italy Creative-Commons license by Mary Harrsch at Flickr

Word of the Week! Autarchy / Autarky

Our word came to me spelled “autarky,” but then I discovered a second spelling, “autarchy.” The OED reveals a curious double-meaning, both related to our current economic moment in the United States and perhaps, around the world.

First, autarchy can mean policies that promote “economic self-sufficiency in a political unit,” but second and more darkly, “despotism.” Both ideas clearly have been tossed about by supporters and opponents of current tariffs on foreign goods. This blog is not interested in advocacy; feel free to ask my opinion of tariffs, in person. You’ve been warned.

For this blog, however, I do find that the double-meaning needs a bit of unpacking. Why would self-sufficiency and tyranny share one word? Both meanings come from the Greek αὐτάρκεια, so we have a loan word that caught on in the 1600s. Both senses of our word first appeared in print then with an example meaning “absolute sovereignty, despotism” cropping up in 1665. Earlier, in 1617, we get “The Autarchie and selfe-sufficiencie of God” but here it’s God’s self-sufficiency and not supreme power being evoked.

Autarky in its dark sense was often used in the 1930s to describe the enemies of world trade, then Imperial Japan’s drive for a “Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” and, as you’d expect, European Fascism.

In the US, the America-First platform after World War 1 and the rise of Technocracy, Inc. in the 30s both included autarchy in both senses of the word, with the latter wanting to build a continental “Technate” from the North Pole to beyond Panama as an “independent, self-sustaining geographical unit.” We heard this idea again recently and I looked up the old maps of the planned Technate. One appears at the top of this post. Make of its influence what you will.

When I studied Technocracy as part of my doctoral dissertation in the early 1990s, the idea seemed quaint, even ridiculously antique. Since then the frequency of usage for our word remained nearly steady, peaking in 2000.

Will ours be a Century of Autarchy / Autarky? We’ll find out.

Send words and metaphors my way 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: 1930s map of the Technate, from Technocracy Inc.

Word of the Week! Contronym

I enjoy playing the New York Times‘ Wordle and Connections games daily. Recently the latter game used contronyms for one grouping of four words. I got it, eventually, then looked up the definition.

We have a simple definition this week: a word that can have two completely opposite meanings. The examples given by a quick search were cleave (to sever or to join), garnish (to add or penalize, as in “your wages are being garnished for non-payment of that fine”), oversight (to ignore or to monitor), and sanction (to prohibit or to permit). The final one has a cousin, unsanctioned, meaning unauthorized. That clears matters up considerably, but many other contronyms offer no alternatives.

English-language learners need to use context to figure out the right term. So do too many native-speakers in their first few years in college, as today’s students have rotten vocabularies from a lack of attentive and frequent reading (a future metaphor of the month will be “Brain Rot”).

I found a list that offers 75 common contronyms. Some of them seem simpler than others, but a few very confusing words appear there. Have a peek.

Some usage advice: if the context remains hazy, employ a different word. In the case of “we don’t know if this development will hold up our plan” (delay or support), I’d change it to one of those words. Incidentally, “hold up” can also mean armed robbery! Speaking of legal matters, in business and criminal-justice writing in particular, a secondary audience can be found in the courtroom. Use the right word or ask your attorney. In short: find one who does fine work to avoid paying a fine.

Send words and metaphors my way 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 courtesy of Pixabay.