Richmond Writing – About words and writing, from the University of Richmond

Metaphor of the Month! Earworm

We have, this week, a first cousin the the term lyricosis, covered a few weeks ago.

The earworm provides a vivid metaphor when a piece of music gets lodged in your ear and you cannot stop hearing it.

As early as the 16th Century, as the OED attests, an earworm meant an earwig, a common insect that is easy imagine crawling into some sleeper’s ear. There it would lay eggs that hatch brain-eating larvae. To date, I’ve know exactly zero people who have had this horror occur to them. Wikipedia’s entry on the creature claims the idea to be no more than an Old Wives’ Tale, a term worth a future post as metaphor of the month.

On the other hand, I was surprised to find that 1982 marks The OED’s first recorded use of our metaphor in the sense we use it today. What did we call such brain lodgements of music before the Reagan Era?

From ten years earlier, there’s one song I love to hate, “Sylvia’s Mother,” a 1972 hit by the rock band Doctor Hook’s Medicine Show. A talented children’s cartoonist and author, Shel Silverstein, wrote this clunker. It bubbles up out of my subconscious every so often and I begin to sing it. My old man and I would belt it out, amid gales of laughter, along with the radio when it came on in the car; he despised the song as much as I do. Dad’s verdict was “That lady was a good mother. The guy on the phone sounds like a loser!” After singing the song, the demon would be exorcised for several months.

The only way for me to be rid of an Earworm, apparently, is to feed it once in a while!

If you have other solutions, please share them, along with words or metaphors worth covering. Email me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leave a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Creative-Commons Image: Chris Rowbury’s Blog

Word of the Week! Mogul

I strongly recommend that anyone in the area attend the exhibition “India’s Great Mughals: Art, Power, and Opulence” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It is yet another stunner from America’s finest state-run museum.

But this blog is not about museums; it’s about words. The wealth of the royal court of the Mughal empire seems distant now, unless one goes to the Taj Mahal or uses the word “mogul.” Dating from 1653 in the sense I wish to discuss, according to the OED, our term comes directly from the Anglicized version of “Mughal,” itself an Urdu word for “Mongol,” since the Mughals traced their ancestry back to Genghis Khan.

In our modern sense, this week’s word means a person of great wealth and power.

The OED’s most recent citation, from 1999, notes that Rupert Murdoch is “a television mogul.” We had movie moguls from the first half of the last century, then software moguls at the turn of the century, though (if I recall correctly) Neal Stephenson called them “software khans” in one of his science-fiction novels. I still prefer that term!

Today, amid the vast sums of money swirling around artificial intelligence, we have AI moguls. All of them, so far, are humans. At times I do wonder, but that would make another post.

The word’s frequency of use bottomed out in 2021 and then began a slow climb. We seem to be in a new era of moguls and their empires. Where it ends, no one knows. The Mughal Empire peaked and then experienced a series of bad leaders and overly lavish living, as its sphere of influence and power slowly withered.

Send me words and metaphors worth covering. Email me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leave a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image: Shah Jahan and an gem. Who knew that he, like me, collected rocks? Image by me.

Word of the Week! Lyricosis

While enjoying the July 4th holiday, outside if you can bear the heat wave, turn on some music. Then consider how you might mishear the lyrics to many a popular song.

“More than a woman,” a 70s hit, became “Bald-headed woman.” I can provide many more examples of lyricosis, or if you prefer Grammar Girl’s term, a Mondegreen, from a writer named Sylvia Wright who misheard a Scottish ballads’ words “and laid him on the green” as “And Lady Mondegreen.”

I have a feeling that lyricosis will outlive its rival, though the OED prefers Mondegreen, offering no entry for lyricosis, and dates Mondegreen’s first use to 1954. I disagree; “lyricosis” has the right root and affix to make it resemble a problem of the ears. “Mondegreen” is a bit too precious and obscure to catch on as slang when we are talking about Abba’s misheard lyric “Dancing Queen, young and sweet, only seven teeth.”

You youngsters might think lyricosis only afflicts those who listen to “Dad Rock” (as if The Ramones would ever qualify, after writing “Teenage Lobotomy“). I disagree: maybe the digital equipment plugged into your fully-functional ears does deliver crisper sound than radio or scratchy LPs, but if a singer slurs any words, you might suffer from lyricosis yourself. While I didn’t ask for AI help, it helped anyway during a Web search, noting that in Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” many hear “All the lonely Starbucks lovers” instead of “Got a long list of ex-lovers,” which seems a stretch but it is funny. That’s the point of lyricosis.

Our word is a neologism, much like musician Steve Miller’s term “Pompatus” that I covered here.

Remember, readers, at the cookout, don’t kiss a fly. `Happy Fourth of July.

Also don’t be afraid to send me misheard lyrics, or words and metaphors worth covering. Email me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leave a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image source: Creative-Commons image of Creedence Clearwater Revival, looking for that bathroom on the right.

Word of the Week! Doohickey

Editor’s Note: Reader Michael Stern authored this post for our summer enjoyment. Consider how many “doodad” or “doololly” or “doojolly” words relate to this neologism. Etymology Online does not give this origin but notes it to be an American neologism from 1914. Now on to Michael’s post.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines doohickey as a “doodad,” which is itself defined as “an often small article whose common name is unknown or forgotten: gadget.” The OED defines it as “any small object, esp. mechanical; a ‘thingummy.” Neither offer a useful derivation but I happened upon what might be a reasonable and interesting one.

On July 9, 1776, Virginia patriots attacked Lord Dunmore and his supporters who were holed up on Gwynn’s Island in Chesapeake Bay. Embedded with the patriots was a French artillery captain who had joined the Continental Army. He built an experimental wooden mortar which was put to use in the attack, only to explode, killing him. He was the only casualty on the patriot side. His name was Dohicky Arundel.

Perhaps Arundel’s given name became a synonym for a nameless contraption (although more than a hundred years would pass before its first recorded use in Kansas Farmer in 1908, according to the OED.)

My source for this information is A Perfect Frenzy: A Royal Governor, His Black Allies, and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution by Andrew Lawler. My wife and I attended a lecture by Lawler at UR a few months ago and, needless to say, we purchased his book.

Send us words, thingamabobs, whatchamacallits, linguistic kluges, and metaphors worth covering. Email me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leave a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Creative-Commons Image: Sleepypete’s blog. Thanks, Pete.

Metaphor of the Month! Liminal Space

Where oh where have 7 years gone? It was yesterday, it seems, that I covered the word “liminal” in this blog. It’s a fancy word for a transition, really. Academics love it in the Humanities, but lately it has taken on a new life with a different category of geeks, namely gamers and internet-forum junkies when used to describe certain sorts of disturbing spaces.

You may have seen advertisements for the horror film The Backrooms. The image above comes from an Internet meme at 4chan that began the uptick in usage for our metaphor. It was taken at a closed furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It’s now a Hobby Town franchise. How the various Backrooms fanatics found that out, I don’t know, but if you wish to dive into the history of this meme, here you go.

I’ve seen Web series called The Backrooms by Kane Parsons; it’s excellent. I find the episodes the sort of psychological horror for those who dislike blood and gore (that would include me). It’s really a masterpiece of the uncanny. I hope the new feature film by Parsons captures that mood as well.

What I find outstanding about The Backrooms concept is how it plays into a uneasiness we all experience when traversing empty transitional spaces. I’ve heard college classrooms called liminal spaces; we don’t decorate them as do K-12 teachers. They are generic and when vacant, mildly unsettling. So are parking garages, empty subway cars, hotel corridors, and even lonely highways (for many of us; I love traveling empty backroads, at least in daylight).

This corridor looks familiar, but it would have a eerie effect on many of us who travel it, even if we had not seen Kubrick’s The Shining. Where are the other guests? Not all liminal spaces are confining. I’d claim that a busy airport terminal feels very different from one late at night, when the last flights have landed and the snack bars have closed. You know what I mean if you have arrived in the wee hours because of a delay.

My pop-psych explanation for The Backrooms craze? COVID-19. We were suddenly confronted with empty spaces that had once teemed with people. I flew through Chicago just a few weeks before the outbreak. It now seems like another world, even compared to airports I visit now. Then for a while, airports all looked like this.

There’s a danger of the metaphor: once you start noticing liminal spaces you cannot stop. The other day I was on campus and visited the Humanities Building, where I once had my office. No one was about, and my footsteps echoed in the corridors. I didn’t tarry long there and got quickly into the bright sunlight.

It unsettled me in a familiar way. One summer, I had the unenviable job of working until midnight at Indiana University’s windowless graduate stacks. I’d start at the 12th floor, sing out that the library was closing, and then turn out the lights. We had to do this for safety reasons. Grad students would work late and fall asleep at their study carrels.

This chore was not frightening, with a master switch for the lights by the stairs, except on one floor. There I had to walk all the way to the end of the stacks to get to the switch. I’d then race back to the stairwell, with only an emergency light to guide me and a feeling that someone, or something, was watching me every night. Every library worker I knew shared the same fear. We waited for that hand to dart out from between the shelves and grab us.

For this and many other reasons, the psychology of liminal spaces interests me, and you can make a beginning study of it all here. Finally, if you see The Backroooms, let me know what you think.

Perhaps I should have saved this post for Halloween! Pleasant dreams.

Don’t be afraid to send me words and metaphors worth covering. Email me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leave a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Creative-Commons images From Wikipedia; Singapore airport image by David Gan. IU Library Stacks from Pinterest.

Word of the Week! Aeolian

Even older than Achilles, the subject of my last entry, is the Greek god of wind, Aeolus. From the god’s name we get our word, meaning an effect of the wind. In geology, it can mean wind-borne erosion. I’ve seen the word employed to describe features on the planet Mars, where NASA rovers are at work currently.

I first encountered the word, as “Eolian,” in an undergraduate class on the Romantic writers of England. Perhaps you know Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1795 poem “The Eolian Harp“? Take a peek. While it is not my favorite of his works, it certainly fixed the word we are discussing in my mind:

And that simplest Lute,
Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!
How by the desultory breeze caressed,
Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover,
It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs
Tempt to repeat the wrong!

At the time, many English were placing one of these wind-harps in an open window. The instrument is older still; Wikipedia’s entry on the harp cites a first description of it in the 1600s, but the instrument itself is ancient. You can find an interesting page on the harp’s history here. The OED notes that as a descriptor for a native of the Aeolian Islands, our word has a first recorded usage of 1546.

The passage of the wind would produce music quite different from a wind chime, though that too is an aeolian instrument (as compared to one that requires human breath to make music). In Coleridge’s era, there amounted to a bit of a craze for these devices, so romantics of all stripes could get one ready made.

Today it’s a bit harder to find one in Costco, so I recommend you build one. Kevin Busse offers some advice here for unusual designs that don’t require an open window. Other sites recommend building it to fit your casement. Here’s a favorite site, Fil Corbitt’s The Wind, with a page on various free-standing harps. Have a listen to the haunting melody from an “Obsidian Sky Wind Harp” (note: the harp has a high pitch, so turn down your volume at first!).

The blog will continue all summer, so send me words and metaphors worth covering. Email me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leave a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Creative-Commons image source: Wikipedia

Metaphor of the Month! Achilles Heel

This is a term I use frequently, probably too frequently. I’ve considered covering another metaphor here from Antiquity, Thucydides Trap, that has been in the news lately. Let’s save that for June.

What of an Achilles Heel?

Our ongoing war with Iran revealed an ugly truth about US life: if you want to make Americans angry across all the social and cultural divides, just raise gas prices. Despite our nation being a net exporter of oil, that commodity gets priced on a global market. If supplies get pinched anywhere, prices rise everywhere. Globally, then, oil prices are an Achilles Heel for our technological civilization. From stupid one-use plastic bags to high-test gas to the diesel in my farm tractors, petrol remains the key ingredient.

It’s then our weakest point. The OED dates the use of the metaphor back to 1705, but the story of nearly invincible Achilles stretches back to Homeric Greece and certainly beyond. The son of a goddess, Achilles got a magical protection from his mother Thetis, who held the boy by his heel and dipped him into the River Styx in the underworld. His heel remained vulnerable, and there an arrow found him during the Trojan War.

Achilles, a cruel warrior, met his doom. Let’s hope we don’t follow him in our addiction to fossil fuels of all sorts. The usage chart at the OED shows no sign of tapering off. Our metaphor, sadly, remains a fresh one.

Update on “Muster”: I covered this term last time, and a reader on campus sent me an example from STEM: “From a psychological standpoint, imagine being a graduate student, particularly a new one, and you find some amazing new chemical entity that passes muster in all respects except for the fact that it is repeatedly returned as a “fail” from a company you do not know.”

Let’s not forget that “muster” appears often in the phrase “pass muster,” which may relate to how soldiers get inspected when they muster for roll call. As I learned in military school, shine that brass and polish those shoes!

The blog will continue all summer, so muster your courage and send me words and metaphors worth covering. Email me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leave a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Creative Commons Image: Achilles from gamificapassengers.blogspot.com

Word of the Week! Muster

While on holiday in Digby, Nova Scotia we noticed a sign by a waterfront park: Muster Point. One such sign had also been on the Digby-Saint John ferry, which I have ridden a couple of times to avoid driving the long way around the Bay of Fundy when visiting my Canadian relatives.

My brain went back to militia musters of Colonial America, where the citizen-soldiers would show up to drill, practice marksmanship, and get drunk. One hopes it was in that order!

On a ship it makes sense to have a designated place for crew and passengers to assemble, in case of emergencies. On land it seems less clear. Digby has the world’s largest scallop fleet. Perhaps the muster is for Coast Guard rescues?

While I never figured out why Digby has such a spot, I can at least share with you the term’s etymology. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces our word to Antiquity, with the Latin word monstrare, “to show,” which we see in our modern “demonstrate.” Later, the term evolved to indicate “show up” or “gather” and we have our militia showing up in the 18th century or crew gathering on deck in a crisis.

There is also a fine share of difference between a muster and assembly point. Read more about that here.

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image: crew muster aboard the International Space Station, NASA at Flickr.

Metaphor of the Month! Bluebird Day

This week I’ll add a favorite new term, one I learned just recently from my friend Henry. I’ve known him since childhood, and I drove out to his farm to see how his animals were doing, help pick up some remaining firewood I’d cut in the Winter, and take a ride in his classic car.

We were cruising down US 33 toward lunch in the town of Montpellier VA when Henry said “it’s a perfect Bluebird day today.” I love bluebirds and looked around, not seeing any, but the deep-blue sky reminded me of their plumage. The noon sky was cloudless, the air crisp, and (at least until the recent April heat wave) my instincts told me to promised a balance of cool weather, sun, and rain that typify early Spring in central Virginia.

Today, some lovely rain has broken the hot-and-dry conditions. Tomorrow, when I hit the road, the forecast promises a few Bluebird days ahead. It’s perfect flying weather up to Bangor Maine, then to visit family in New Brunswick, Canada. Not sure if I’ll see any blue birds, but birding and wildlife watching in the Canadian Maritimes is a very rewarding pastime.

So far, so good. Our metaphor simply means a cloudless day, and The Merriam-Webster Dictionary online cites a first use of 1860 but no context.

I turned to the OED for more guidance. Not a sausage, as the Brits say. I did learn elsewhere that skiers use the term and enjoy such days on the slopes. A blog post on the term claims it originated with skiing. I don’t ski but I love to kayak or hike on a cool, cloudless day.

Tomorrow I begin a short vacation; (semi)retirement means I can take them generally whenever I want. This post will be the last for a a few weeks. I’ll take us out with some Frank Sinatra, so the Chairman of the Board can send you and me on our way.

Whatever the weather, I’ll still be posting here. Send metaphors and words to cover by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image: Close to a Bluebird Day at Powhatan State Park.

Word of the Week! Sine Qua Non

Three words this week, for the price of one. I find this term useful; though I don’t use it myself, I have seen it recently in long-form journalism. Wikipedia has an entire entry on it, so here are a few highlights. See that Wikipedia entry for its application in writing about medicine and the law.

Let’s get the definition out of the way: a mandatory precondition, an essential element, a key ingredient. The full Latin term is condicio sine qua non. So “today, a valid passport is a sine qua non of international travel,” or “to govern well at any level today, knowledge of macroeconomics appears to be a sine qua non for successful leadership.”

The origin is ancient, as we can tell from its Latin roots. That meaning, as given in Wikipedia “without which [there is] nothing,” appeared in the work of the early Christian philosopher Boethius. Earlier still, Aristotle used its Greek equivalent. For formal writing, I always like how a Latin phrase or Latinate word elevates the occasion, as does my taste for dress shirts and sometimes a tie when in the classroom.

What are some other expressions where our phrase might impress readers and make your prose more formal? We simply lack good alternatives in English. “Must have” sounds blunt to me.

Summer break is a sine qua non for most academics and their students. So are frequent posts in a successful blog. As Spring turns to Summer and students leave for break, I’ll still be posting here. Send metaphors and words to cover by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

See all of our Metaphors of the Month here and Words of the Week here.

Image of Boethius from Wikipedia.