Word of the Week! Prescient

Ulysses and TiresiasWe’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

Map of The TechnateOur 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! Contranym

image of person coming to forks in road.I enjoy playing the New York Times‘ Wordle and Connections games daily. Recently the latter game used contranyms 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 contranyms 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 contranyms. 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.

Word of the Week! Topophilia

Shenandoah ValleyI love few places on Earth more than the Shenandoah Valley. Richmond’s West-of-The-Boulevard neighborhood comes close, as do parts of Western Ireland and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Segovia Spain, and not least, the Fundy Coast of Nova Scotia. I would gladly live the rest of my days in any of them and never look back.

In fact, I’m hoping to spend the hot months of my retirement years in the first one: the trick involves finding the right rural property in The Valley. I like neighbors fine, but I don’t want to see them except when I wave my hat at them from the tractor’s seat as they go down the road. Unless I were to live in Segovia or West of Richmond’s Boulevard, I don’t even want to see other houses. Having managed rural land for decades, I know what we’ll face.

All of this serves as an introduction to our Word of the Week and a personal story. I learned our from Atlantic columnist Arthur Brooks, who switched from being a Washington Think-Tank wonk to a writer about happiness. I heartily approve of his change of career. I used to cringe at his columns; now I seek them out. Brooks writes, in a 2021 piece “Find the Place You Love. Then Move There,” about choosing where to choose to live:

There is a word for love of a place: topophilia, popularized by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in 1974 as all of “the human being’s affective ties with the material environment.” In other words, it is the warm feelings you get from a place. It is a vivid, emotional, and personal experience, and it leads to unexplainable affections. 

He acknowledges that we don’t all have the luxury of choice, though moving across town can change your life.  In terms of origins, Wikipedia’s page on the subject provides a solid etymology. Alan Watts reports, in his autobiography, that poet John Betjeman coined the term, and W.H. Auden wrote in his introduction to a volume of Betjeman’s poetry that history with a landscape results in topophilia.

Appropriately, my topophilic relationship with the Valley goes way back.  I recall trips with my parents to buy apples in many places, as my dad was a trucker, then a produce wholesaler. Best of all involved visiting friends at the little hamlet of Massie’s Mill, VA, where Tom Massie managed an orchard. Tom was a business associate second and friend first to my dad. Dad saw Tom as a practical Appalachian farmer whose strong, quiet persona, long history in that place, and obvious love of the land made him special. Even pre-teen me picked up on this feeling. He adored that farm and it showed in his care for it.

Topophilia swayed my old man, who was a tough city-boy through and through, but he’d mellow the second he stepped out of his big GM car at Tom’s.

The Massie family lost their matriarch in the terrible floods of 1969, when the remnants of Hurricane Camille parked themselves over that part of the Valley. Tom’s mother’s house was washed away to the foundation and her body never recovered. My dad barely escaped earlier in the day. He was hauling a load of apples to Winchester in ferocious weather down the Tye River Valley. He said the rain was solid and the road treacherous. He knew something awful was coming so he kept going as water covered the road. He spoke quietly later of the Massie’s tragedy, but when we returned, Tom and his family seemed as tied to that beautiful place as ever.

My own topophilia for The Valley continued to deepen over the years. Decades later, my wife and I began to make monthly trips to a farm near Stuart’s Draft, VA, to buy feed for our growing flock of chickens. With the flock approaching 90 hens, we go through more than 300 lb of feed monthly. Ostensibly, the trip lets us save money by buying truckloads in bulk, but the trip also reinforces my topophilia.

I have a theory (run while you can). If we really loved the places we lived, and I don’t mean the structures that shelter us, would we ruin them with sprawl, pollution, wider roads, and other forms of debasement? Rural Henrico was once lovely. No more. So many places I visit around Richmond’s periphery have become generic, forgettable. Money and convenience drive our decisions, not topophilia. Maybe too many of us don’t stay in a place long enough to establish that deep connection.

If we practiced topophilia by living where we love, wouldn’t we do a better job? Sadly, there’s no guarantee. There’s an Amazon distribution center a few miles up the rural road from where we buy our feed. The jobs are nice and yes, I have a Prime account. Yet if we loved places more, we’d build such giant buildings on gray-field sites where a closed factory now stands.

The Pandemic afforded us the opportunity to rethink how we work and where we live. It promoted me, in part, to retire from full-time work early. The Valley, after all, awaits. I’m laying my plans.

What places do you love most? Why can’t you move there? As Brooks notes, “perhaps the biggest barrier for you is the sheer audacity of moving for a feeling. The reward from moving just because you want to is hard to defend logically. Some people will think you are crazy.”

My old man was a homebody. He’d have thought me crazy for living on a Goochland farm, but crazier still for my topophilic need for mountain vistas and even more farmwork.

Sorry, Pop. I’ll plant some apple trees, just like Tom Massie did.

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 source: location undisclosed. I don’t want neighbors I can see…

Word of the Week! Strangelovian

Slim Pickens from Doctor StrangeloveFunny that this month I found in my mail box a special issue of The Atlantic, marking the 80th anniversary of the nuclear age. I really enjoy printed magazines, incidentally, though for this one I gobble down their online content, as well.

I’ve subscribed for the past 40 years, so I’ve been around for half the time we’ve had mushroom clouds casting their long shadows. Twenty years before I subscribed, we had one of the finest dark comedies of the 20th Century, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Doctor Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love The Bomb.

One of the pieces in the special issue focuses on the films of the nuclear era, where I encountered our word of the week. It’s commonly gets defined as “of or pertaining to nuclear apocalypse, especially through incompetence or shortsightedness.”  I cannot trace the origin of the definition, as most free online dictionaries provide exactly those same words.

Whatever the source, they prove apt.

You may recall the titular character of the film is a not-so-former Nazi scientist working for the US government. During the’ crisis Kubrick depicts, Strangelove joins US officials, and one Soviet, in “The War Room” as the superpowers hurtle toward doomsday. Comedy ensues, much of it graveyard humor. I’ll stop with the plot there, but Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Slim Pickens put in signature performances well worth your time, and nervous laughter, today.

The film’s antiwar message was made all the stronger by the absurdity of the times: with the world on the precipice of mutual assured destruction, how could anyone in power consider a nuclear war winnable? That’s the core of “Strangelovian” humor. The OED gives first recorded use in 1978, which surprised me. It also notes, that while our word has not widely employed, usage has begun to creep upward, perhaps in keeping with increased worries about nuclear proliferation.

That makes both film and word noteworthy today. May cooler and wiser heads prevail than did in the film, when we next face a real crisis.

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.

Word of the Week! Brinkmanship

Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 1961With such a tense situation in Iran currently, I decided to trot out a Cold-War term. I recall how often the USSR and US nudged each other in my childhood and teen years. Matters often seemed “on the brink” of a catastrophe. The 1961 Berlin Crisis, shown above, illustrates how close matters came at times. I was barely alive then.

Being a snarky youth in the 70s and 80s, and a wee tyke when Hippies roamed the Earth, I did not recall Boomers’ air-raid drills or fallout shelters. We had a board game (still have it) called Nuclear War by Flying Buffalo Games, as well as one of the sequels, Nuclear Escalation. Hint: lots of games ended with us all being losers.

Whatever, Xer. “Whistling in the dark” will soon be a Metaphor of the Month.

Meanwhile, where did our current term come from? The OED is acting up today, despite my using the university’s account and VPN, but I see from their fact page that our word dates to a 1956 New York Times story and means advancing to the brink of war without necessarily intending to start one. Etymology Online, which never acts up for me (there being no paywall), states that our term comes from the policies of John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. Being “on the brink of war,” meanwhile, dates back to 1829.

I always liked Ike. Dulles? Used to be my favorite airport (BWI is, now). I never studied his work, beyond a book on the Suez Crisis.

Brinkmanship seems canny and wise, when used by the wise. Dulles was wise, by all accounts I have read.

Let’s hope that happens again today.

As Richmond simmers like a bowl of chili con carne, send cool (and cooling) 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: Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 1961. Via Wikipedia.

Words of the Week! Epigraph, Epithet, and Epitaph

Rodney Dangerfield's tombstoneI’ve been away a bit, but I’m back for May term and beyond. So this blog will solider on this summer.

Here’s a moment when an AI proved smarter than I am. I had asked the latest free model of ChatGPT 4 about Max Beerbohm’s story “Enoch Soames,” whose exact title I’d forgotten but whose plot I recalled. After the AI pointed me in the correct direction, I congratulated it on its ability to provide correct advice, noting how (since the Devil plays a big role in Beerbohm’s story) that AI was not the Devil; we humans have the market cornered there. Then it said this:

“And you’re right: humans have a much longer track record when it comes to hubris, temptation, and poetic pacts gone wrong. We’re just here to assist, not to tempt. (Unless you’re looking for the perfect epigraph—in which case, all bets are off.”

Thus my words of the week. I imagine that my students run across the words I feature this week. So what are the differences? Here are a few ground rules:

Epitaph: memorial lines written on a tombstone. It needs to be personal so “rest in peace” won’t cut it. Jefferson’s notes his founding of the University of Virginia, as well as his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and Virginia statute of religious freedom. Note the lack of any mention of his Presidency. It’s a short epitaph. At the other extreme, at Westover Plantation for Garden Week, I read William Byrd II’s epitaph. Byrd made sure he crammed in a great deal about himself, as he was no paragon of modesty. I will skip a bit:

Here lyeth the Honourable William Byrd Esq. being born to one of the amplest Fortunes in this Country. . . .To all this were added a great Elegancy of Taste and Life, the well-bred Gentleman and polite Companion, the splendid Oeconomit [economist?] and prudent Father of a Family, with the constant Enemy of all exorbitant Power, and hearty Friend to the liberties of his Country.

There’s a morbidly funny story about me and another fellow arguing over the correct epitaph for a mutual friend. We split the cost for his headstone but never agreed on the words to be carved there. The conversation got heated. In the end, both epitaphs appear on the stone in Riverside Cemetery along the banks of the James River. They both work, as long as you didn’t know the deceased. If so, they prove hilariously contradictory.

We’ll let futurity puzzle out that epitaph. It’s not as good as comedian Rodney Dangerfield’s, but it makes me chuckle when I visit our friend’s gravesite.

Epithet: Most of us have one. I’d wager we all have a nickname. King Edward I was “Long Shanks” and Virginia is “The Old Dominion.”

Epigraph: First cousin to epitaph, this is the quotation placed at the start of some long documents. The Wikipedia page on the topic includes many famous examples. My favorite in that list? Gertrude Stein’s remark to Hemmingway that “you are all a lost generation.” He chose to lead off his The Sun Also Rises with this quotation.

Now how do we sort them out, without coming back to this blog post? I have no easy mnemonic to give you. So let’s try the same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.

As we drift along this summer, send me any words or metaphors of use to jessid-at-richmond-edu or leave a comment below.

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

Image courtesy of Wikipedia. Show Rodney some respect.

Word of the Week! Metric

Metric Image

Back from the fun with googly eyes, I thought of a commonly used but poorly understood term from academia and business. Lee Parker’s recently nominated word rubric made me think of its linguistic cousin.

Instead of the adjective form we associate with the Metric System, here I mean the noun.

I think of a metric as one (usually of many) measures we employ to measure something.

This may be a short post! The OED gives this definition, “A system or standard of measurement; a criterion or set of criteria stated in quantifiable terms” with a first usage of 1934. As a plural, our word can be a synonym for statistics, figures, measurements.

Our word stands in no danger of extinction. Since 2017, usage per million words of written English has more than doubled. Thus, a data-driven world.

If you have a metric for what constitutes a short blog-post, I hope I met it.

Send me any words or metaphors of use to jessid-at-richmond-edu or leave a comment below.

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

 

Word of the Week! Googly-Eyed

Book cover with Googly EyesOnce you start looking for them, you cannot unsee them. It began on the Amtrak on my way to Baltimore to attend the CCCC 2025 convention. In the Quiet Car there appeared a poster with a young woman looking at the Amtrak schedule on her smart phone.

Some wag had stuck little plastic googly-eyes on the poster. I laughed out loud. Nothing academic here, but the term began to interest me. Where did it come from?

In Baltimore, on a stroll toward Fell’s Point, I had two more googly-eye spottings. One appeared on the cover of a book; the other on a harbor trash-collector boat. The signboard identifying parts of the boat noted that the goggly-eyes make the boat look friendly.

Boat with Googly EyesI’d assumed, wrongly as usual, that our term was a corruption (or improvement, your choice) of the phrase goggle-eyed. In my cruel high school, I learned how that meant anyone with thick glasses or bulging eyes.

The OED set me to rights on this matter, noting that we have “Perhaps a variant or alteration of another lexical item.” That “perhaps” provides a coy way of saying “we really do not know.”

My money, as well as Wikipedia’s, is on Barney Google, a nearly forgotten cartoon character. He is no relation that I know of to the software giant and dates from the early 20th Century.

Barney did indeed have bulging eyes. Now I need to go to a craft store and find some stick-on googly eyes for…never you mind. I’m not the only one thinking of this idea.

Barney Google

On a different train coming back from Baltimore, there they were again. Someone is up to something.

Googly Eyes on Amtrak Poster

Thank goodness.

If you have any clever ideas about our term’s origin, or, better still, a term or metaphor of some consequence that you’d like covered here, send them to jessid-at-richmond-edu or leave a comment below.

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

Images: Barney from Wikipedia; other googly eyes by me.

 

 

Word of the Week! Rubric

liturgical manuscriptThanks to Lee Parker in Information Services for this popular but seemingly poorly understood term. Lee notes that “Based on my usage and that of H.G. Andrade I expect ‘a scoring tool’ among the definitions. Why isn’t it?” Let’s find out!

The origin goes back to the Middle Ages; The OED entry states that directions in liturgical books, written in red, would give directions to those conducting religious services. Later definitions get us closer to Lee’s idea. By the 18th Century, a rubric could mean a custom, a set of rules, a “general prescription.” Later still, we have starting in 1959 “An explanatory or prescriptive note introducing an examination paper.” The list of definitions goes on and on, including makeup to make one’s complexion rosy and a calendar of saints.

The origin? In Classical Latin, rubrīca for red ochre. Despite that ancient lineage, usage of our word has done nothing but increase since a low point in 1930.

Merriam Webster Online provides a familiar definition that I did not see at The OED (horrors!) and one that gets close to my own sense of  “a guide listing specific criteria for grading or scoring academic papers, projects, or tests.”

I admit to playing fast and loose with our word, often using it when I mean a series of steps writers need to take in order to complete an assignment, before I grade it.

So Lee, you are correct: rubrics, in popular parlance today, mean a scoring tool, though I like the idea of red-letter manuscripts, ochre for makeup, and calendars of saints.

Send me words and metaphors to 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.

Creative-Commons image liturgical text with rubrics, courtesy of The Saint Lawrence Press.