{"id":529,"date":"2018-08-30T14:41:04","date_gmt":"2018-08-30T18:41:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=529"},"modified":"2018-08-30T14:42:34","modified_gmt":"2018-08-30T18:42:34","slug":"metaphor-of-the-month-ivory-tower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2018\/08\/30\/metaphor-of-the-month-ivory-tower\/","title":{"rendered":"Metaphor of the Month: Ivory Tower"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This week we begin a new monthly feature. And the timing, in our second week of classes, is spot-on appropriate.<\/p>\n

For new students who may have forgotten the concept, a metaphor is a type of figurative speech calling a person or thing something it is not, such as “John is a real skunk!” or the famous parables in the Bible, with the Kingdom of Heaven suddenly becoming a mustard seed.<\/p>\n

Now on to our first academic metaphor.<\/p>\n

We think, commonly, of “The Ivory Tower” being the haunt of cloistered academics.\u00a0 Where on earth did that come from? French, actually. The OED Online<\/a> traces the origin of our term to the second quarter of the 19th Century, from\u00a0tour d’ivoire<\/em>, as a place of sanctuary from the world and its troubles.\u00a0 The image is older, going back to (thank you, Wikipedia<\/a>) to The Song of Solomon 7:4:<\/p>\n

“Thy neck\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0as a tower of ivory; thine eyes\u00a0like<\/em>\u00a0the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The similes and metaphors just pile up here, rather odd tools of seduction, and in this book of the Bible they get racy, fast. Have a look yourself.<\/p>\n

In any case, I find it fascinating that none of the examples provided by the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>, as well as my antique version of Webster’s New Collegiate,<\/em> show the drift in meaning to academia, especially toward the negative sense that political pundits often use to attack us. Only The American Heritage Dictionary<\/em> sheds a little light (another metaphor!) on our phrase, noting a place of “intellectual considerations rather than practical everyday life.”<\/p>\n

I have many colleagues who would argue that our business in the Ivory Tower is very much about everyday life, especially how to live it in a considered and enlightened way, but this post is no more an op-ed than it is a look at the Bible’s salacious metaphors. Yet that final definition gets us to the pejorative sense of the term. Other ages had Lotus-Lands. We moderns are only left with an ivory tower.<\/p>\n

Please nominate a word or metaphor useful in academic writing by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.<\/p>\n

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

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0\u00a0of St. John’s College, Cambridge, courtesy of Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week we begin a new monthly feature. And the timing, in our second week of classes, is spot-on appropriate. For new students who may have forgotten the concept, a metaphor is a type of figurative speech calling a person or thing something it is not, such as “John is a real skunk!” or the … Continue reading Metaphor of the Month: Ivory Tower<\/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":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1181,2516,1172,87399],"tags":[87401],"class_list":["post-529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-culture","category-academic-writing","category-language","category-metaphor","tag-metaphor-of-the-month"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-8x","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529","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=529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}