{"id":1132,"date":"2020-02-20T13:48:48","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T18:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=1132"},"modified":"2020-02-20T14:04:15","modified_gmt":"2020-02-20T19:04:15","slug":"word-of-the-week-moot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2020\/02\/20\/word-of-the-week-moot\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week! Moot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Moot<\/a>I find it odd that I’ve not covered “moot” before. Perhaps my interest skews toward the Latinate. This short term just drips with the mists of the Celtic fringe of Northern Europe.<\/p>\n

So, it’s not a moot point: where did it come from? Northern Europe, yes, but not Celtic languages. Origins of the word go to Germany and Scandinavia, all with a sense of a meeting<\/a>. Remember “Ent Moot” in Tolkien’s The Two Towers<\/em>?\u00a0 Yet that is a real meeting. Noting “mock” about it.<\/p>\n

So how did our word take on its modern sense of a “moot court”?<\/p>\n

Moot can also mean a tree-stump<\/a>\u00a0, something our Oxford Don would have certainly considered in choosing his term for a meeting of talking, walking trees. Some noun usages mean merely “an argument” rather than the place where it occurs. Only when we get to moot as an adjective<\/a>, meaning “having no practical significance or relevance; abstract, academic” or “unable to be resolved,” do we get our familiar meaning. Points in court were declared “moot,” and I have idea how the very word for the gathering became the word for a non-desirable outcome.<\/p>\n

Bryan Garner’s excellent\u00a0A Dictionary of Modern American Usage<\/em> holds that “this shift in meaning occurred about 1900” (436). He says not why.<\/p>\n

The reasons for that shift are not moot points. It would be worth more research to discover why.<\/p>\n

Please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.<\/p>\n

See all of our Metaphors of the Month\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Belgrade Moot Court, courtesy of Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n

Garner, Bryan A.\u00a0A Dictionary of Modern American Usage.\u00a0<\/em>Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I find it odd that I’ve not covered “moot” before. Perhaps my interest skews toward the Latinate. This short term just drips with the mists of the Celtic fringe of Northern Europe. So, it’s not a moot point: where did it come from? Northern Europe, yes, but not Celtic languages. Origins of the word go … Continue reading Word of the Week! Moot<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2516,87405,1172,87402,40197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-writing","category-etymology","category-language","category-legal-writing","category-vocabulary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-ig","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}