Word of the week – Page 6 – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Dungeon

“All those years of Dungeons and Dragons taught me…” begins a hilarious moment of wisdom from the old and often wonderful series The X-Files. Still, what is a dungeon?

The game envisions a dangerous place full of monsters where one can get lost forever. Or in the case of the image above, history teaches of a dreadful below-ground prison where people get put and forgotten. That wretch of a manakin was being gnawed on by a stuffed rat, at Bolton Castle in Yorkshire, when I visited in 2009. The history was horrible but the effect? Monty-Python and Far Side cartoons.I began to wonder about dungeons this week when I asked our Registrar’s office to get me the heck out of a ground-floor classroom with terrible lighting, a loud air-handler that will not stop running, and two tiny windows to natural light that vanish as soon as our overhead-projector screen lowers.

At 9am, such a setting does not bode well for teaching undergrads. We discussed the term in our new room today, and a few students recalled donjon from French. The origin appears (according to the OED entry) Anglo-Norman and first recorded use in the 1300s. Later senses moved the dungeon from a fortified tower (think of the Tower of London) underground, as at Bolton Castle.

In case your mind dove into the gutter, only in our strange current times has the term acquired a sexual connotation. First use in the OED’s reckoning? 1969.

D&D’s dungeons? 1974.

There you have it, dungeon-crawlers (a D&D term for a party of adventurers who descend into the inky, horror-filled depths).

Nominate a word students need to learn 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! Embedded

I recently discovered this word, associated with “embedded journalists” during the Afghan and Iraqi wars, used for writing centers. No, we are not battlefields except for ideas and stylistic choices. Yet when we assign a Writing Consultant to a specific class, that employee gets called, at some other centers, “an embedded tutor.”

Seeking clarity for the first use of “embedded” in this sense, I tried The OED, but the dictionary only describes an item fixed inside another, with usage going back to the early 19th Century. Our final arbiter of definitions remains silent about the word, as modern metaphor.

Oxford Reference helps with etymology, giving a date of 2002 for a Pentagon strategy regarding reporters in war zones. Ostensibly the use of reporters attached to a military unit could have protected the non-combatants, yet as Oxford Reference’s entry notes, seconding what I have read in other accounts, at times the act of embedding resulted in journalistic bias, favoring the military or a particular operation.

As this blog does not directly concern itself with journalistic ethics or military affairs, I leave it for the reader to decide. Yet when we make a person part of a team, in an academic sense, can we likewise expect a completely unbiased result? I suspect that reasoning underlies the ex officio status of senior administrators on many academic committees. They step into discussions only when needed.

Where have you encountered our word?

Nominate a word students need to learn 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 courtesy of Craig Duas at Flickr

Word of the Week! Volition

This word has a great deal of relevance when we discuss Open AI’s ChatGPT software. That program elicits responses that range from unreasoned panic to pedagogical curiosity among colleagues locally and globally.

We fear, in short, that a machine will replace us.

Yet the AI has no volition. The OED entry defines our word as “An act of willing or resolving; a decision or choice made after due consideration or deliberation; a resolution or determination.” It comes from Latin volo, “I wish” or “I will.”

I decided to ask the AI about this. It replied “No, I am a machine learning model and do not possess volition or consciousness. I can only respond based on the patterns and information in my training data.”

If Strong AI ever develops, it will be able to ask us questions by itself, taking our answers to improve its own code. No developers needed to tweak its 1s and 0s.

Let that give you some comfort, as you are readers endowed with volition, curiosity, and the ability to change the contents of your mind by applying those two marvels. Consider this question put to the AI:

Beatles or Rolling Stones?

The Rolling Stones is a legendary British rock band that formed in 1962. They are considered one of the most influential bands in the history of rock music, and have produced many iconic songs such as “Satisfaction,” “Brown Sugar,” “Start Me Up,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

On the other hand, I’m not aware of any specific references to “Lumpels” as a band, so I can’t make a comparison. Based on this context, I can say that The Rolling Stones is a more well-known and influential band compared to “Lumpels”.

Nominate a word students need to learn 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 of Cylon Centurions courtesy of Dr. Gaius Baltar.

Word of the Week! Solvent

I build plastic models as a hobby, and for much of the work, among the adhesives I employ a glue that works as a solvent. It dissolves things, making parts stick by making polystyrene soft.

Our word has, in business, nearly a contrary meaning. One who is not bankrupt and can pay debts is also called “solvent.” Instead of taking away something, solvency here adds solidity. Or perhaps solvents that work as adhesives add strength by temporarily weakening?

Yet that cannot be the case: if you have worked with strong enough solvents, you know that they dissolve completely the substance called a solute, resulting in a solution. Yes, I got a C in college chemistry.

It amazes me that both senses of our word, the two most commonly heard nowadays, date to about the same time, if one studies the OED entry.

Incidentally, we often speak of the bankrupt as “insolvent,” a sense not used with chemicals (as far as I know).

This post will remain a mystery to me. Why did such different meanings emerge from the same Latin roots? That’s one of the things I most enjoy about looking at familiar-seeming words. “Solvent” has a frequency band of 6 (of 8) at the OED. it’s a daily word.

Nominate a word students need to learn 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 of solvents courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Marcescence

My wife Nancy gets credit for this post, when she pointed out how the Beech trees in our woods hold their leaves all winter. Oaks do for a while, too, after the first cold snap. Nan informed me that this quality of some plants is called marcesence.

I’m a tree lover, not a scientist, so this quality of some plants appealed to me when their marcescent leaves rattle in the wind. The OED entry gives that adjective a “Band 2” in usage, meaning it keeps company with “words which occur fewer than 0.01 times per million words in typical modern English usage.” As lexical items go, in English it’s a newcomer, dating to scientific usage in the 18th Century, with (as we can hear when we say it) a Latin progenitor meaning to wither.

I’m certain any faculty who teach botany use our word more frequently. The quality of marcescence may, as the Wikipedia entry notes, protect the plant from large browsing herbivores who otherwise would much on twigs and smaller branches.

No offense to them and their work, but it’s a word we Humanists should steal. It has an onomatopoeic sound, like the murmuring of dry Beech leaves. Our word is rife with metaphor, particularly at the start of a new semester.

Do you have any old leaves you need to shed? Or ones to hold onto that may protect you until Spring?

As Tennyson says in one of the poems that can be found his Arthurian epic Idylls of the King, “the new leaf ever pushes off the old.” Soon we and those trees clinging to their leaves won’t have a choice.

Hello, January.

Nominate a word students need to learn 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 of partially marcescent Beech courtesy of Wikipedia.

Word of the Week! Truculent

Not long ago I covered insolent, a label that teachers affixed to me in grade school. I was also labeled with our current word of the week. It too has Latin roots. Maybe my label came from the many fights I got in, usually getting pummeled but always coming back for more.

The OED entry gives us barbarous, savage, fierce, and other words I love. Yes, that was grade-school me.

I have not been truculent lately, though the word came up in a fine article by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic, where the scholar of online culture and gaming logged on to Open AI’s ChatGPT and “asked for a set of diagnostic criteria for an invented psychological condition I named ‘Inherited Truculence.’ ”

The AI, by the way, has led many in academia to declare without much evidence but much truculence that the written essay is dead. Not so fast, I’ll shout, with my own pronounced truculence. I find the AI’s answers to one of my course prompts worthy of an F, as it cited no sources despite the prompt’s requirement.

More on Open AI here soon. Have a non-truculent holiday with your family and friends and if you get truculent thinking of snow, tough. I’m truculent with those who prefer summer to winter. Bring that snow in mountains, please.

See you in January but you can still nominate a word students need to learn 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 from Judy Baxter at Flickr. An image search for “truculent” turned up this stag. I once had one charge me in the Madrid Zoo, so there you go. Truculent!

Word of the Week! Umbrage

Old Well House

I had no idea that this word, usually employed with the verb “take,” and meaning “to show displeasure,” has cast a long and complex shadow. Shadows grow lengthy this time of year, so let’s step into them for a moment.

Several obsolete meanings shown in The OED’s entry give us a sense of how, over centuries, definitions change. The word itself stretches its long shadow back through Old French to Latin, with a first-recorded use in English from the early 1400s.

At first, our word signified a shadow cast by a tree’s foliage or an object, even by a King or other grandee. Later it came to mean a feeling of suspicion; the modern “the shadow of a doubt” and “cast doubt upon” preserve some of that earlier umbrage.

I like this very old word, but The OED provides no examples later than 1900. Currently it enjoys a “usage frequency” of 4 out of 8 in The OED editors’ estimation. I bet the frequency will drop, as this week’s word falls ever more into the umbrage of time. Time leaves us all in the shade, eventually. Let’s not take umbrage about that ineluctable fact.

Nominate a word students need to learn 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 of a well-house roof and its umbrage by the author.

Word of the Week! Recrudescence

Thanks to Robyn Bradshaw, UR Catering, for wondering about this term. I do not hear it in speech, but it’s not terribly unusual in academic prose, where students may encounter it.

No one is likely to say that we will “experience a recrudescence of COVID-19 this winter,” even thought that may occur. The first definition given by The OED notes our word, borrowed from Latin, can mean a recurrence of a disease, an outbreak. We’ll likely use “new outbreak” or “uptick” to describe that unfortunate possibility.

Delving a little deeper into The OED entry, a more hopeful second definition appears, for the rediscovery or recovery of something already known to be useful. So if we find an abundance of commercially valuable rare-earth elements on the Moon, a possible outcome of our current exploration program there, some erudite journalist may indeed use our word to describe such a pleasant surprise.

Okay, I’m back to riding one of my hobby horses, human-crewed space exploration, about which I’m a zealot. We’d name a spacecraft Discovery (and have, with the Space Shuttle of that name pictured). I doubt we’ll ever see a vessel called Recrudescence going to the Moon or Mars. That “crud” bit sticks on the tongue. So does the “crude” sound!

Nominate a word students need to learn 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! Insolent

Professor Joanna Drell, History, stopped me in the hall today with a nomination for my “word thing.” I was delighted, as I do have a “thing for words” (literally and metaphorically) and also because “insolent” was a thing I’d been called many times in grade school by nuns. Probably “you insolent thing!” got pinned to me a few times.

Am I insolent now in my tone? And where does our word originate?

My teachers and mentors probably (and rightly) got after me for being “contemptuous of rightful authority,” as The OED entry notes in its second definition. I often still am, usually asking “by whose rights?”

Other definitions do not fall far from that one, though the first strikes me as curious, “Proud, disdainful, haughty, arrogant, overbearing; offensively contemptuous of the rights or feelings of others. Said of the powerful, rich, or successful, their actions.” The OED notes that this usage has become obsolete, but I find it fascinating how our word got associated with wealth and privilege.

Tell that to Robespierre, on your way to the guillotine.

Obsolete, really? There I am, being insolent again. The word, from Latin, proves as old as insolence itself, with a first-recorded usage dating to 1386.

Nominate a word by stopping me in the hall or by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.

Insolent kid (I know that face!) courtesy of Wikipedia

Word of the Week! Fungible

Two mushrooms walk into a bar. The bartender shouts “Out with you! No plants allowed!”

One ‘shroom replies “Hey, I’m no plant! I’m a fungi!”

Okay, it’s not only a bad joke, but it should be “a fungus” (singular) for you botanical purists. In any case, I did just check and fungi are not considered plants.

When my colleague Professor Jack Molenkamp, Visiting Lecturer in Business Law and Adv Business Law in the Robins School of Business, requested our word, that old joke reared its fungible head. Yet why “fungible” for a bad joke?

In law or business, a fungible commodity can be exchanged for another without “breaking the terms of a contract,” as The OED patiently explains. We see this at rental-car agencies, when the Nissan Sentra you planned to rent gets replaced by a Toyota Corolla. Under the terms of the rental agreement, you get a compact car in return for the daily fee; no guarantee of color or model gets stated. If one reads the small print, it specifies that another make can be substituted. Thus, anything fungible can be broadly considered “interchangeable” or “replaceable.”

As Thanksgiving approaches, consider the self-inflicted plight of Neal Page, Steve Martin’s character from the brilliant Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Trying without success to get home in time for Thanksgiving, Neal encounters one disaster after another, raging at a clerk that he just wants to get into a [expletive deleted] car. No dice for Neal. He should have read the contract that he threw away in anger; his car is gone from its parking spot but without the paperwork, the rental agency has no legal obligation to provide another fungible asset to replace the one for which he just paid.

Like Neal’s car, a fungible item, or side dishes offered with the entree (without an upcharge) at a restaurant, the subject of a “walk into a bar” joke can be exchanged infinitely for other subjects without changing the terms of the joke. Thus my favorite:

A three-legged dog walks into a saloon in the Old West and says “I’m lookin’ for the man who shot my paw.”

Okay, I’m done. My colleague did not need bad jokes, but he did need to tell me how greatly it puzzled him that his students did not know the meaning of “fungible.” I agree with him: anyone in business or law needs to understand the concept of fungibility.

As with “pagination” last time, I lay the blame on students not being serious-enough readers. You cannot acquire a strong vocabulary without reading. Sorry, students. Since few students read blogs, I again address my audience of faculty and staff. What are the key words in your field that an undergrad should know before getting a degree?

Why does the lack of reading among students (and peers!) irritate as much as, say, Neal’s situation in the rental car lot?

Nominate a word students need to learn 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.

Photo mashup by me. I prefer the Corolla’s grille and hue.