Word of the Week! Torpor Richmond Writing

Word of the Week! Torpor Richmond Writing Torpor, torpid: they describe the mood and setting of a gloomy late-February day. The ground is muddy, the buds not quite ready to open. A few daffodils are in bloom, but, really? April seems a year away. We will see a bit more snow and ice. If a prior Word of the Week,   doldrum, fit the late-summer mood last year, our word today provides the right February descriptor: listlessness, dullness of mood, or spiritual lethargy, as the OEDs entry puts it. That was my sense of it as a word-hungry undergrad who sometimes felt a bit torpid, for various existential or self-inflicted reasons. The term seems to date to at least the 13th Century, probably earlier given its unaltered Latin origin. Its also fun for me to see a Latin term come down to us basically unchanged, without sounding very Latin. An obsolete usage applies to physics, specifically, inertia.   The OED provides a noun form, too, torpidity. Shake off your torpidity and take a brisk walk. Spring will arrive. Please nominate a word or metaphor 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. Photo by the author.