{"id":1298,"date":"2020-08-10T10:25:44","date_gmt":"2020-08-10T14:25:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=1298"},"modified":"2020-08-10T10:25:44","modified_gmt":"2020-08-10T14:25:44","slug":"word-of-the-week-peroration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2020\/08\/10\/word-of-the-week-peroration\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week! Peroration"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Agora\"<\/a>George Souleret, whom I met during his time with University Facilities as an HVAC Engineer, nominated this week’s word. I saw it first as “perforation,” and wondered to what new uses that old term had been put.<\/p>\n

Blame bifocals or autocorrect, but I need to thank George for teaching an old faculty member a new word that he most certainly should know. According to the OED<\/a>, our word is a speech (sometimes just the end of one) or discourse in general.\u00a0 I often tell students that academic discourse as we know it, as well as reasoned debate in the Western tradition, began in the era of Socrates. I visited the site of the Athenian Agora in 2007, and to me it was as sacred an experience as I’ll ever have in this life.<\/p>\n

We have some excellent perorations, such as Pericles’ famous funeral oration,<\/a> given before the great plague of Athens, a story that we may wish to revisit today. That epidemic swept away Pericles and two of his sons.<\/p>\n

On a lighter note, I love one current usage given: “A perfectly dreadful hour-long\u00a0peroration<\/span>\u00a0by an American scholar.”<\/p>\n

Thus I’ll spare you a dreadful peroration on peroration. In an election year, I expect we’ll have our share of perorations, some dreadful, a few delightful.<\/p>\n

But the term does provide a formal and Latinate synonym that, in the right place, provides an option to “speech,” “presentation,” and other similar terms.<\/p>\n

image of the\u00a0Stoa of Attalos,<\/em>\u00a0housing the Athenian Agora Museum by me, 2007.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Souleret, whom I met during his time with University Facilities as an HVAC Engineer, nominated this week’s word. I saw it first as “perforation,” and wondered to what new uses that old term had been put. Blame bifocals or autocorrect, but I need to thank George for teaching an old faculty member a new … Continue reading Word of the Week! Peroration<\/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":[2516,87406,2520,40197],"tags":[2522],"class_list":["post-1298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-writing","category-loan-word","category-usage","category-vocabulary","tag-word-of-the-week"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-kW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298","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=1298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}