{"id":1358,"date":"2020-10-16T15:22:22","date_gmt":"2020-10-16T19:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=1358"},"modified":"2020-10-16T15:53:02","modified_gmt":"2020-10-16T19:53:02","slug":"word-of-the-week-portent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2020\/10\/16\/word-of-the-week-portent\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week! Portent"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Portent\"<\/a>I suspect we will encounter this word frequently as the election approaches, both about the outcome and other events, for good or ill, on and after election day.<\/p>\n

The word has the ring that Latin-derived terms bring to serious situations. And the portents look as serious as our nation’s current troubled state. But what is a portent, itself?<\/p>\n

The OED’s first definition<\/a> bears repeating in full: “A sign, indication, or omen of a momentous or calamitous event which is about to happen.”<\/p>\n

Not all portents portend terrible events. There can be portents of rainy weather ahead, if one knows how to watch the clouds and winds.<\/p>\n

Pope, Faulkner, Milton, and other writers in whose shadows we live all used the term well. Have a peek at the OED’s definitions. It’s one of their better entries.\u00a0 Synonyms are tough to find that have the same power: Melville tried it with the chapter called “Loomings” in\u00a0Moby Dick<\/em>: it does capture the sense of a ship suddenly appearing out of a fogbank.<\/p>\n

“Augury<\/a>” is another possibility, from telling the future by watching the behavior of birds.\u00a0 The OED notes that other natural signs can be employed.\u00a0 My other possible synonym,\u00a0Omen,<\/a>\u00a0works well but it reminds me of a particularly terrifying 1970s horror film.<\/p>\n

What is coming at us, out of the fog we traverse? Watch the portents. One or two will be accurate.<\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, as I’m tracking how Grammarly rates my own writing, my tone is “sad.” Now that’s a bad portent for November 3.\u00a0 But it’s also informative and mostly formal. That’s the best I can give you today.<\/p>\n

Send words and metaphors to jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu. See all of our Metaphors of the Month\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

image from Rockwell Kent’s illustrations for <\/em>Moby Dick.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suspect we will encounter this word frequently as the election approaches, both about the outcome and other events, for good or ill, on and after election day. The word has the ring that Latin-derived terms bring to serious situations. And the portents look as serious as our nation’s current troubled state. But what is … Continue reading Word of the Week! Portent<\/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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2516,40197],"tags":[2522],"class_list":["post-1358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-writing","category-vocabulary","tag-word-of-the-week"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-lU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358","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=1358"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1367,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358\/revisions\/1367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}