{"id":880,"date":"2019-06-27T13:46:42","date_gmt":"2019-06-27T17:46:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=880"},"modified":"2019-06-27T13:46:42","modified_gmt":"2019-06-27T17:46:42","slug":"metaphor-of-the-month-shambles-shambolic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2019\/06\/27\/metaphor-of-the-month-shambles-shambolic\/","title":{"rendered":"Metaphor of the Month! Shambles \/ Shambolic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Yorkshire<\/a>Joe Hoyle in our Business School and my old friend Dominic Carpin, owner of Dellicarpini Farm<\/a>, nominated “shambolic” as a word of the week. Then I began to think of “The Shambles” in York, England, a series of meandering streets of half-timbered Medieval buildings.<\/p>\n

Instead of a word, we have before us a metaphor.\u00a0 The Shambles were places in England where butchers plyed their\u00a0 trade.\u00a0 A “Shamble<\/a>” itself was, as early as the 9th Century, a wooden stool. Later, it meant a different piece of furniture: a table where butchers set out meat for sale.\u00a0 From a still later and metaphorical use, I’ve seen “shambles” used in works about naval warfare during the age of sail; the insides of wooden vessels under cannon fire looked like butcher shops.<\/p>\n

From these grisly examples we get the figurative “shambles,” meaning a messy, disorderly situation or place.\u00a0 And thus the adjective “shambolic,” marked by the OED<\/a> as colloquial and of recent coinage–the late 1950s!<\/p>\n

This is not mere linguistic drift (see the entry on the word “fulsome<\/a>“) or euphemism<\/a>. It gets to the heart of why English is such a flexible language. From ancient senses of a word–who would advertise their butcher shop as a “shambles” today?–we get new words and nuance.<\/p>\n

We’ll keep at it all summer! 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 Metaphors of the Month\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Photo, 2009, of York’s Shambles, by the author.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Hoyle in our Business School and my old friend Dominic Carpin, owner of Dellicarpini Farm, nominated “shambolic” as a word of the week. Then I began to think of “The Shambles” in York, England, a series of meandering streets of half-timbered Medieval buildings. Instead of a word, we have before us a metaphor.\u00a0 The … Continue reading Metaphor of the Month! Shambles \/ Shambolic<\/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":[2516,87405,87399,40197],"tags":[87401],"class_list":["post-880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-writing","category-etymology","category-metaphor","category-vocabulary","tag-metaphor-of-the-month"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-ec","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880","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=880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}