jack: (haylp/wacky races)
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?