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.