Language and Popular Culture



Linguistics 057
Assignment #1
Three New Words
January 17, 1997
(Anonymous)


  1. MACHO

    MACHO is an acronym used by astronomers to refer to a new kind of astronomic body. According to one website,

    MACHO stands for Massive Compact Halo Object; the MACHO team is searching for gravitational lensing events that might reveal baryonic dark matter in the galactic halo. As of 1 September, the MACHO project started nightly observations on the 0.9-m telescope.
    URL: http://www.noao.edu/noao/noaonews/dec94/art19.html

    Another site describes it as follows:

    Because light rays are bent when they pass close to a massive object, light from a distant source may be focussed by a closer object to produce a sudden brightening of the distant object known as "gravitational microlensing''. If there is a significant population of faint and small mass stars or Jupiters in the Milky Way, gravitational microlensing of distant stars might be common enough to be detectable. A microlensing event would be the explanation for an otherwise unpredicted increase in the brightness of one of the targets stars, followed by a similar decrease in brightness, returning the star to its original intensity. Hence, the monitoring of the brightness of distant stars looking for the characteristic brightening and subsequent fading might provide proof of the existence of unseen MAssive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOS)?
    Source: http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/Courses/astro201/macho.htm Because these objects are massive, the use of the term MACHO evokes some of the original (Spanish) meaning of the word, i.e. MACHO's are definitely not wimpy objects.

  2. Scandalabra

    This word is a blend using the existing words scandal and candelabra and presumably relies on the metaphor of the candelabra, which has many arms and branches. Thus it is a scandal which has many branches and ramifications. I thought it was a new word, recently coined to describe the Clinton scandals:

    Award winning liberal journalist, Roger Morris, penned one of the better Clinton bios to come out last year, "PARTNERS IN POWER: The Clintons and their America". Morris' effort is perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the ever metastasizing Clinton scandalabra yet put between hardcovers. Therein, Morris reports an incident which demonstrates that biting fetishes aren't limited to randy play by play announcers.
    (source: http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a8777.htm In fact, however, Scandalabra was the title of a play written by Zelda Fitzgerald, and produced in 1933 for the first time. (Source: ZF's play, Scandalabra, produced by Vagabond Junior Players in Baltimore. (http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/chronology.html)

  3. WIMP

    WIMP is an acronym for a kind of `particle physics candidate' i.e. a new kind of matter still under discussion by physicists:

    There is broad class of particle physics candidates for the dark matter that are referred to as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or WIMPs. This class includes several proposed particles (massive Dirac neutrinos, cosmions, SUSY relics) that have masses of order a few GeV to a few hundred GeV and interact through the exchange of W's, Z's, higgs bosons and other intermediaries.
    The source for the above quote is: http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~dns/MAP/Bahcall/node8.html The interesting thing about this term is that it evokes the more common meaning of `wimp' as a sort of weak, unassertive person. The WIMP is definitely not a MACHO item, unlike the MACHO described above. Both terms use the connotations of the older terms as part of their meaning.


haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu