{"id":1925,"date":"2023-02-23T14:47:04","date_gmt":"2023-02-23T19:47:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=1925"},"modified":"2023-02-23T14:49:32","modified_gmt":"2023-02-23T19:49:32","slug":"word-of-the-week-dungeon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2023\/02\/23\/word-of-the-week-dungeon\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week! Dungeon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Wretched<\/a>“All those years of Dungeons and Dragons taught me…” begins a hilarious moment of wisdom from the old and often wonderful series The X-Files<\/em>. Still, what is<\/em> a dungeon?<\/p>\n

The game envisions a dangerous place full of monsters where one can get lost forever. Or in the case of the image above, history teaches of a dreadful below-ground prison where people get put and forgotten. That wretch of a manakin was being gnawed on by a stuffed rat, at Bolton Castle in Yorkshire, when I visited in 2009. The history was horrible but the effect? Monty-Python and Far Side<\/em> cartoons.\"Dungeon<\/a>I began to wonder about dungeons this week when I asked our Registrar’s office to get me the heck out of a ground-floor classroom with terrible lighting, a loud air-handler that will not stop running, and two tiny windows to natural light that vanish as soon as our overhead-projector screen lowers.<\/p>\n

At 9am, such a setting does not bode well for teaching undergrads.\u00a0 We discussed the term in our new room today, and a few students recalled donjon<\/em> from French. The origin appears (according to the OED entry) Anglo-Norman and first recorded use in the 1300s. Later senses moved the dungeon from a fortified tower (think of the Tower of London) underground, as at Bolton Castle.<\/p>\n

In case your mind dove into the gutter, only in our strange current times has the term acquired a sexual connotation. First use in the OED’s reckoning? 1969.<\/p>\n

D&D’s dungeons? 1974.<\/p>\n

There you have it, dungeon-crawlers (a D&D term for a party of adventurers who descend into the inky, horror-filled depths).<\/p>\n

Nominate a word students need to learn 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","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“All those years of Dungeons and Dragons taught me…” begins a hilarious moment of wisdom from the old and often wonderful series The X-Files. Still, what is a dungeon? The game envisions a dangerous place full of monsters where one can get lost forever. Or in the case of the image above, history teaches of … Continue reading Word of the Week! Dungeon<\/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":[87406,40197],"tags":[2522],"class_list":["post-1925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-loan-word","category-vocabulary","tag-word-of-the-week"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-v3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1925","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=1925"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1930,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1925\/revisions\/1930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}