July 2026 – Richmond Writing

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.