{"id":1328,"date":"2020-09-22T07:13:05","date_gmt":"2020-09-22T11:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=1328"},"modified":"2020-09-22T09:14:35","modified_gmt":"2020-09-22T13:14:35","slug":"word-of-the-week-tardy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2020\/09\/22\/word-of-the-week-tardy\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week! Tardy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Running<\/a>Here’s an odd word that one hears in school, and oddly, one I’ve not covered here before. I’ll flag it under “academic culture,” since that seems to be the most common usage, as in “tardy students will be docked for each time they arrive late.”<\/p>\n

Given the tardy nature of this week’s post, let’s give it a go. From its Latin origin,\u00a0tardus, <\/em>we have several forms in modern Romance languages, such as\u00a0the modern Spanish\u00a0tardio. S<\/em>trangely, it was a word I never learned living in Spain, where my Madrid students were perpetually tardio<\/em>.\u00a0 In English it sounds less Latinate.<\/p>\n

As the OED has it<\/a>, tardy has always meant “slow,” though in US English it has come to mean “late” or “arriving late.” Consider other words such as “retarded,” in its non-pejorative sense. It means to slow down, as in this sentence: the damage during the test flight retarded development of the new airliner.<\/p>\n

That sounds more forceful than would “slow” or “delay,” though either would suffice as “retarded” has a negative sense we would do well to avoid.<\/p>\n

Older meaning for “tardy” carry similar meanings but have lost currency. Consider this 1908 example from the OED, “When a girl used to think her admirer rather\u00a0tardy<\/span>\u00a0in asking for the wedding-day.” Sounds quaint and old-fashioned, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n

Just set the date, man! I’d go on a bit, but I’m running late.<\/p>\n

Don’t be tardy in getting us your favored words and metaphors!\u00a0E-mail jessid-at-richmond-dot-edu with your nominees. See all of our Metaphors of the Month\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Creative-Commons image courtesy of The Noun Project<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s an odd word that one hears in school, and oddly, one I’ve not covered here before. I’ll flag it under “academic culture,” since that seems to be the most common usage, as in “tardy students will be docked for each time they arrive late.” Given the tardy nature of this week’s post, let’s give … Continue reading Word of the Week! Tardy<\/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":[1181,2516,40197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-culture","category-academic-writing","category-vocabulary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-lq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328","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=1328"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1334,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1328\/revisions\/1334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}