"Ziphead" and "Haylp" tags

[jack]

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?

Comments

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

Um. Taboo? Albatross? Elephant in the room?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:)

Elephant is the right meaning. But I'm fairly sure I was thinking of a word like "shibboleth" and it wasn't "behemoth" :)

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

"blown out of all proportion" is the phrase that comes to mind, but that doesn't sound anything like what you're thinking.

google can suggest "habit" :p

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

also, this: http://johntranter.com/prose/authen.shtml

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

OED gives you this for shibboleth, in a recent (1993) addition:
[3.] [a.] Hence, a moral formula held tenaciously and unreflectingly, esp. a prohibitive one; a taboo.

Which seems pretty close to what you're driving at. I'd never heard of it that way though, and it doesn't seem to make sense to me - being prescriptive, not prohibitive, in Judges.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's it! Thank you very much. Curse my inadequate non-OED dictionaries. (I just check it with my Cambridge library access, and yes.)

If it derived from "A catchword or formula adopted by a party or sect, by which their adherents or followers may be discerned, or those not their followers may be excluded", when the formula was a moral instruction, I guess it acquired that sense simply because many such examples were prohibitive, or prohibitive ones more urgently needed a word.

So now we know. Though I wonder why I acquired that meaning in my vocabulary. It obviously was the common/first meaning I saw, but I don't remember learning the word in any specific incident, and everyone else seems to have been exposed to the older meaning lots more.