August 2026 – Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Dusking

This time of year the sunsets get awfully nice, and the temperatures moderate enough to enjoy some outdoor time at dusk. I’ve covered gloaming here before, eight (!) years ago, but recently a new-to-me term cropped up in a BBC story. You can find a full description of the term here at a Conversation post.

That piece notes that dusking “involves watching the light start to disappear, noticing the changing colours of the sky, the emergence of evening sounds.” This serves as a form of relaxation. My wife do this nearly every night when the weather allows, from our screened-in back porch or open front porch. With a cool drink and my occasional cigar, it’s a perfect way to celebrate quietly the passing of the day.

This piece and the BBC story link the rise in dusking to the Netherlands. It makes sense; after a brutally hot summer in 2026, Northern Europeans probably sigh in relief, as Virginians have done for a long time, and head outside to see the last of the light. I am just old enough to recall life in Richmond before central air-conditioning or even, in our modest neighborhood south of what is now Carytown, window units. Every home on the block had sizable front porches, some with ceiling fans, where we gathered at dusk. People took short walks and said hello. There was an ice-cream parlor within a five-minute stroll. It was a delightful ritual of the mid-1960s soon to vanish onto back decks and family rooms with color TVs. At the time, however, it seemed as if dusking on the front porches would never end. I wish that world still existed.

Today at our house, without neighbors to greet, we pick the front or back porch and continue the tradition. We joke about the word “mauve” and pronounce it in various ways. You only see those colors emerge around dawn and dusk.

I label this use of “dusking” as a neologism, but the word itself dates to the 16th Century, as the OED notes.

Neologism or not, I want our modern sense of the word to become common. We live in a time of screen-blindness, cognitive offloading to imperfect AI models, wasteful haste, and a ridiculous “fear of missing out.”

Just don’t miss out on that next sunset. I would love to see dusking become our next addiction.

Send in 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.

Image: Creative-commons license by Cathay Pacific.

Metaphor of the Month! Trojan Horse

How timely, this post and Christopher Nolan’s epic The Odyssey. I don’t need to delve far into the etymology of this word, but its continued use (like Achilles’ Heel, covered here earlier) attests to the power of the image as well as its source material.

For our horse, however, we also see how powerful trickery can be, especially when cloaked in the guise of a gift. Matt Damon’s Odysseus certainly captures the consequences of such deceit in the film.

I’d hazard a guess that the metaphor has been with us as long as Homer’s stories. Today many of us have fallen prey to the modern Trojan Horse: a piece of innocent-seeming software containing a virus or other “malware.” Usually, the attack comes from a reputable-looking sender or a family member whose contact lists have been hacked. These are, indeed, gift horses whose mouths we should look into.

You could call any “phishing” attempt that asks you to click a link or open a file attachment a Trojan Horse. I.T. folk often refer to them as “Trojans,” which has other inferences I won’t discuss, as this is a family-friendly blog.

Beware of Geeks (and ancient Greeks) bearing gifts.

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts”: that saying comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, a far later epic of Roman origin, but it captures the idea of a Trojan Horse masterfully.

Send me words and metaphors worth covering, but not as suspicious file attachments or links! Email me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leave a comment below. Want to write a guest entry? Let me know!

Image: Wikipedia, the Mykonos Vase, one of the earliest known depictions of the Trojan Horse, c. &50-650 BCE).

Word of the Week! Moribund

With classes about to resume on campus, the moribund time of late summer is about to end. Caveat: it ends for the students and those faculty and staff working next semester; I’m away from teaching until perhaps Spring 2027 as I finish some scholarly writing. My retirement, such as it is, has not been moribund at all, even as I get to savor the Golden Hour in September from my back porch, not through a car’s windshield on a commute.

“Moribund” has a dreary sound, doesn’t it? The OED entry notes it means “at the point of death; in a dying state, close to death,” and that certainly describes our summer vacation now. At the same time, I thought that it also meant “stuck or stagnant,” and the entry online has a second definition of “displaying such a lack of vigour or vitality that recovery appears impossible.” Right on the money, again!

I wonder if the use of our word has become moribund? It was first recorded in the early 1700s; usage peaked in 1950 and has suffered a steady decline that appears irreversible. Funny thing, that: we are now about about the same usage frequency as the year 1900. The 20th century, so vital and dangerous in many ways, also served as the period of popularity for the word. I’ll hazard a guess that the reading public had better vocabularies then. Reading for pleasure, in these frantic times, seems moribund.

I like the term, because of its dreary, deathly sound but I doubt we’ll see it spring back to life as a popular word, in my lifetime.

Set aside your back-to-school plans for a moment to send in 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.

Image: Late Summer by Christian Kortum at Flickr.

Word of the Week! Conundrum

Now that my password is reset at UR and I’ve the two-factor app on my new phone, these posts can resume. I feel, however, that all of our technology has put us into a conundrum: what was supposed to make life simpler has led to many complications. Consider all the passwords you have to set, all the pop-up windows you have to close, ads to block, spam to filter.

This was not the promise of the Internet in the 1990s. Instead, we are faced with an unsolvable riddle, a dilemma, a paradox. In short, a conundrum.

Our word’s etymology merits a look. The Online Etymology Dictionary has this fascinating history:

“1590s, an abusive term for a person, perhaps meaning ‘a pedant;’ c. 1600, ‘a whim;’ 1640s, ‘pun or word-play,’ a word of unknown origin, said in 17c. to be Oxford University slang.”

I have never heard anyone called a conundrum, though I’ve known plenty of pedants and been called one myself. But we can see from the evolution in our word’s meaning how the sense of something that eludes an easy answer came to be.

As for our technology conundrums? Go analog more. Silence the phone. Ditch the Social Media conundrum of it promising to connect us but instead dividing us.

Get an ad blocker. Good luck!

As Summer wanes (thank goodness; I hate hot weather) and Fall semester resumes, send in 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.

Image: The Gulf of Corryvreckan whirlpool in Scotland, From Wikipedia.