Metaphor of the Month! Spartan Richmond Writing

Metaphor of the Month! Spartan Richmond Writing Lets continue the Peloponnesian fun with another word from Ancient Greece, in fact, from Laconia that gave us last weeks laconic. Sparta was, of course, one of the most powerful Greek city-states. Yet  why did a friend describe a minimalists house as Spartan? How did the virtues espoused by Marie Kondo align with those of King Leonidas? Its clearly a metaphor associated with not having a lot of stuff / bare bones /   austere / reduced to essentials. A look at the culture of ancient Sparta yields a lot of good information on Spartan values: hierarchy, simplicity, a militant orderliness for all things. The OED dates this sense of the adjective to the 19th Century, for frugality or brevity (as in a laconic reply). Since this is still Sparta at our blog, or at least a pretense of it, Ill end there. 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. Marie meets Leonidas, courtesy of Photoshop.