{"id":2688,"date":"2026-03-01T20:57:26","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T01:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=2688"},"modified":"2026-03-01T21:01:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T02:01:10","slug":"word-of-the-week-nuance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2026\/03\/01\/word-of-the-week-nuance\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Week! Nuance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Everglades<\/a>When checking to see if I’d featured this useful term before, I found\u00a0 FOUR pages of entries that contained “nuance” in the text but none that gave it a starring role. Time to fix that! Clearly, I love this word.<\/p>\n

Frankly, I love anything nuances. You may know my hatred of the Superhero genre of film: I can tell you the plot after 10 minutes for most of them. Boring! They contain some clever dialogue but little mystery or surprise: those are the soul of nuanced stories.<\/p>\n

So few things in our world–whatever zealots of any stripe say–are binary. Instead, we encounter subtle shades of differences, slightly varying experiences, a spectrum of personalities, not a series of pigeon-holes. Just put down the phone some twilight and watch a sunset unfold. No two are identical.<\/p>\n

The Online Etymology Dictionary<\/em> notes<\/a> the origin of our word, “slight or delicate degree of difference in expression, feeling, opinion, etc.,” 1781, from French\u00a0nuance<\/i> “slight difference, shade of color.”<\/p>\n

And there we have it. Now get out of your chair and enjoy some nuanced experiences outdoors as Spring unfolds. They are as close on the UR campus as a stroll around Westhampton Lake as the leaves unfurl.<\/p>\n

Send words and metaphors my way by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!<\/p>\n

See all of our Metaphors of the Month\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Image: Publicdomainpictures.net, “Everglades Sunset”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When checking to see if I’d featured this useful term before, I found\u00a0 FOUR pages of entries that contained “nuance” in the text but none that gave it a starring role. Time to fix that! Clearly, I love this word. Frankly, I love anything nuances. You may know my hatred of the Superhero genre of … Continue reading Word of the Week! Nuance<\/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":[2516,87406,40197],"tags":[2522],"class_list":["post-2688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-writing","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-Hm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2688","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=2688"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2693,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2688\/revisions\/2693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}