| May. 19th, 2008 @ 01:00 pm "Ziphead" and "Haylp" tags |
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Hm, in retrospect, maybe my "requiring help" tag should have been "ziphead", not "haylp". "Haylp" is probably funnier, but "ziphead" is geekier. Most of the time, "help me" posts are actually seeking a small bit of information or calculation, like "what's this word" or "does anyone have a program to do foo", when ziphead (a computer system including excessively focused people to do the intuitive thinking, useful when you need partly computer-fast access, and party human-random access) exactly describes what I want.
But some of the time I need genuine physical help, eg "anyone give me a lift" or "who wants pizza in return for heavy lifting". Maybe I should have two different tags?
Today's question
Anyway, todays question is: "What word means something that acquires a large and totemic importance, typically in a negative way" eg. "We'd avoided talking about the subject so long it had become an X.". And sounds a bit like "shibboleth"?
Did I confuse Shibboleth with another word? Or pick up an incorrect meaning of "shibboleth" from context? Or does "Shibboleth" mean that but I failed to find it on dictionary.com? Or did I just invent this?
I hope there's a really easy answer? |
