{"id":2349,"date":"2024-12-06T07:44:08","date_gmt":"2024-12-06T12:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=2349"},"modified":"2024-12-08T13:44:54","modified_gmt":"2024-12-08T18:44:54","slug":"word-of-the-week-valedictory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2024\/12\/06\/word-of-the-week-valedictory\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week! Valedictory"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Woman<\/a>I’m not saying farewell to the blog, since I plan to continue Words of the Week and Metaphors of the Month into retirement. I’m sure others will write here to share occasional program-related news and other matters I’ll be handing over, rather joyfully, when I hand over the keys to my campus office.<\/p>\n

I want to thank two readers of this blog who appeared at my retirement event on campus. Your presence means as much to a writer as any public event or accolades.<\/p>\n

So if I’m not going anywhere, why a word about farewells? For one, we stand at semester’s end. That seems as good a time as any for remarks about the word valedictory, if not valedictory remarks. A few students in our program graduate early, so consider this post a valediction of sorts to them. I hope to see them at Commencement in May, when they will walk across the stage with all the pomp and circumstance that a university can muster in what promises to be a difficult era for our nation generally, higher education in particular. I will be curious to hear what our Valedictorian has to say about these times.\u00a0 They get the honor of saying goodbye to their class.<\/p>\n

But back to our word. Several times I have run across this week’s term in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Broken Road<\/em><\/a>, the final part of his trilogy about walking from Holland to Istanbul on the eve of World War II. He’s a fine writer, one of my favorite English writers, in fact. He likes, perhaps a bit too much, our term. To be fair, he struggled writing this final work and never finished it before his death. If you want to encounter a remarkable and precocious voice, start with his A Time of Gifts<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For all of Fermor’s repetition, I found a good use of this week’s word. In the gathering dusk, he takes leave of an English woman who had emigrated after marrying a Bulgarian. Her home remains full of English mementos, and Fermor writes, as he steps off into darkness, “I could just discern the valedictory flutter of a white-sleeved arm raised as she waved goodbye.”<\/p>\n

The author here communicates a deeper truth in his trilogy: travel of an introspective sort becomes a series of saying goodbye to places and people we encounter. Sounds obvious, but I first found the idea articulated in the work of the Dutch novelist and travel-writer, Cees Nooteboom<\/a>. That author, whose translated essays about Spain, collected in a 1992 volume Roads to Santiago<\/em>, also states that when traveling mindfully rather than by check-list, we learn about ourselves as much as the locations we visit.<\/p>\n

No cruises or micromanaged tours for him, Fermor, or me. During my favored form of travel, each valediction becomes an act of self-knowing. A camper van’s flat tire in Iceland this year meant two days in Bl\u00f6ndu\u00f3s, a riverside village where we got to know nearly everyone. I did not want to leave. William Least-Heat Moon calls it “the fecundity of the unexpected” in another excellent book about travel, Blue Highways.\u00a0<\/em>Valedictions and sudden surprises crop up again in Dinner With Persephone<\/em>, Patricia Storace’s moving account of her long-term stay in Greece, some spent not far from where Fermor lived after World War Two.<\/p>\n

\"Blunduos<\/a>
From our campsite. Not a bad place to have a flat tire.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What’s the origin of our term? Sounds Roman enough, but which Latin or Greek word spawned this long goodbye? Indeed, as Etymology Online shows us, we have Latin\u00a0vale<\/em> plus dicere<\/em> (for “to say,” still with us in a Spanish verb I use a great deal, decir<\/em>) to give us “saying goodbye,” “bid farewell,” and other expressions of parting.<\/p>\n

So why not simply say “bye bye,” or maybe “TTYL,” in our time of staring at screens and hurrying constantly?<\/p>\n

Nuance. We seem to lose it with every text and social-media post. Partings do not seem so final in an age of constant, if shallow, connections.<\/p>\n

Fermor makes it plain that any parting meriting a valediction bring some pain.\u00a0 Travelers, like academics, are not mere tourists. Travelers dive deeply into a place to find the fecund unexpected, even the unpleasant. A few such places then get revisited as often as life and wallet permit. I suppose I’m writing this post as a valediction to Paddy Fermor as much as anything; after The Broken Road<\/em> I’ve only one more work of his to read. Fortunately books, like cities, can be revisited, but doing so only requires walking to the bookshelf.<\/p>\n

Whether you wish to kick the dust off your shoes at the end of 2024 or wave to it a fond farewell, I’ll be around for your words and metaphors. Send them to me at jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu or by leaving a comment below. See all of our Metaphors of the Month here<\/a>\u00a0and Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

TTYL. Can’t resist sometimes.<\/p>\n

Image source:\u00a0Caleb Oquendo<\/a> at Pexels.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not saying farewell to the blog, since I plan to continue Words of the Week and Metaphors of the Month into retirement. I’m sure others will write here to share occasional program-related news and other matters I’ll be handing over, rather joyfully, when I hand over the keys to my campus office. I want … Continue reading Word of the Week! Valedictory<\/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":[2516,87405,40197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-writing","category-etymology","category-vocabulary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-BT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2349","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=2349"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2364,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2349\/revisions\/2364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}