{"id":2829,"date":"2026-07-16T15:35:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T19:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=2829"},"modified":"2026-07-16T15:44:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T19:44:39","slug":"metaphor-of-the-month-earworm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/2026\/07\/16\/metaphor-of-the-month-earworm\/","title":{"rendered":"Metaphor of the Month! Earworm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Boy<\/a><\/p>\n

We have, this week, a first cousin the the term lyricosis<\/a>, covered a few weeks ago.<\/p>\n

The earworm provides a vivid metaphor when a piece of music gets lodged in your ear and you cannot stop hearing it.<\/p>\n

As early as the 16th Century, as the OED attests<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

From ten years earlier, there’s one song I love to hate, “Sylvia’s Mother<\/a>,” 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.<\/p>\n

The only way for me to be rid of an Earworm, apparently, is to feed it once in a while!<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

See all of our Metaphors of the Month\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Creative-Commons Image: Chris Rowbury’s<\/a> Blog<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Metaphor of the Month! Earworm<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6904,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87405,87399,87419,40197],"tags":[87401],"class_list":["post-2829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology","category-metaphor","category-music","category-vocabulary","tag-metaphor-of-the-month"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6904"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2829"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2834,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions\/2834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}