Shambolic Richmond Writing

Metaphor of the Month! Shambles / Shambolic Richmond Writing Joe Hoyle in our Business School and my old friend Dominic Carpin, owner of Dellicarpini Farm, nominated shambolic as a word of the week. Then I began to think of The Shambles in York, England, a series of meandering streets of half-timbered Medieval buildings. Instead of a word, we have before us a metaphor.   The Shambles were places in England where butchers plyed their   trade.   A Shamble itself was, as early as the 9th Century, a wooden stool. Later, it meant a different piece of furniture: a table where butchers set out meat for sale.   From a still later and metaphorical use, Ive seen shambles used in works about naval warfare during the age of sail; the insides of wooden vessels under cannon fire looked like butcher shops. From these grisly examples we get the figurative shambles, meaning a messy, disorderly situation or place.   And thus the adjective shambolic, marked by the OED as colloquial and of recent coinagethe late 1950s! This is not mere linguistic drift (see the entry on the word fulsome) or euphemism. It gets to the heart of why English is such a flexible language. From ancient senses of a wordwho would advertise their butcher shop as a shambles today?we get new words and nuance. Well keep at it all summer! 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, 2009, of Yorks Shambles, by the author.