{"id":1397,"date":"2020-12-07T14:12:42","date_gmt":"2020-12-07T19:12:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=1397"},"modified":"2020-12-07T14:12:42","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T19:12:42","slug":"word-of-the-week-infamy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2020\/12\/07\/word-of-the-week-infamy\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week: Infamy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Pearl<\/a><\/p>\n

This post will likely run a day after the 79th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt rightly claimed it “a date which will live in infamy.”\u00a0 Yet when was the last time you heard this word used in any context?<\/p>\n

I hope we remember to pause on that day of infamy, reading FDR’s speech\u00a0annually, but I also hope we add this word to our working vocabularies.\u00a0 FDR’s first draft read “a date which will live in world history,” but as a source at the National Archives explains<\/a>, he inserted “infamy” when revising the typescript of what he’d dictated. How he produced something that profound, under so much pressure, should inspire us to do better amid the crisis we face in these comparatively easier times.<\/p>\n

The meaning is plain: we understand “fame” being positive, so “infamy” and “infamous” are negative. The term’s origin is Latin and French, as the OED<\/a> puts it. I suspect an origin far older than the 15th Century, though like many words discussed here, it’s less a matter of first use than of Gutenberg’s invention providing us with the means to check surviving texts.<\/p>\n

One legal definition is new to me, of a “loss of all or certain of the rights of a citizen, consequent on conviction of certain crimes.” That seems reasonable enough for some infamous folk, once convicted by a jury of their (presumaby, not infamous) peers.<\/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 Wikipedia<\/a>: first moments of the first wave of Japanese carrier planes over Ford Island, Pearl Harbor<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post will likely run a day after the 79th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt rightly claimed it “a date which will live in infamy.”\u00a0 Yet when was the last time you heard this word used in any context? I hope we remember to pause on that day of … Continue reading Word of the Week: Infamy<\/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":[2516,87402,40197],"tags":[2522],"class_list":["post-1397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-writing","category-legal-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-mx","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397","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=1397"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1401,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1397\/revisions\/1401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}