Word of the Week! Philology Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Philology Richmond Writing No, Ive not misspelled philosophy. That words lesser-employed cousin means, at its Greek roots, a lover of words.   If you are reading this, you must at least have a crush on words. As with last years post, for the day commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King, I wanted a word that would describe him. In addition to his other gifts and accomplishments, Kings writing demonstrate his love of words and metaphor. He was certainly a non-academic philologist.  So when did philology, as a word, originate? Why has its usage tapered off today? The OED gives us Chaucers example from the 14th Century, then more early 16th Century examples for earliest uses; as with so many other words at this blog, blame Gutenberg for that. I suspect that the study of language, and the sharing of ideas about it, spread with the spread of printing. Usage ranks a surprising four of eight on the OEDs scale. That means our word is not common but also not unguessable for English speakers. It ranks alongside one of my favorite words, schismatic, yet I imagine that more academic ears would recognize our term than the one just given. Outside of Academia, both would sound alien. Even within my circle of scholarshipwriting centers and writing classroomsno one has ever called a colleague a philologist. Why then has this term fallen from favor in learned circles? Most faculty I know have a curiosity about language, whatever academic discipline they practice. One supposition I see, in a casual Google search, involves snobbishness and worse, bigotry, an early generation of scholars who served as gatekeepers for proper written English. Those same grandees might be horrified by the OEDs inclusion of another of my favored words, badass. To learn more about the modern debate about the history of philology and what constitutes philology today, read James Turners book from Princeton University Press (I plan to) and  Mark Libermans post about how it fell from grace as a formal academic pursuit. Liberman posits a new definition that I both like but find limited, the discipline of making sense of texts. Can we broaden that to spoken language? More than ever, we could use an inclusive form of philology to get students and those outside our campuses to be curious about, even come to love, the play of words. Poetry slams are a start. Studying speeches by King and other gifted writers would be another branch of modern philology. Id welcome any other speculations about the waning of philology, as word or practice, in comments. While you speculate, please send us words and metaphors useful in academic writing by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below. See all of our Metaphors of the Month  here  and Words of the Week  here. Image of ancient books of Wales courtesy of Wikipedia.