fetish

fetish

1. Fetish, meaning ‘a thing evoking special respect’ (and more precise meanings in anthropology and psychology), is now pronounced fet-ish. The word is a 17c adoption of French fétiche, and was originally an African object or amulet having magical power, although the word itself is not of African origin.

2. Fowler (1926) extended the use of fetish as a term for ‘current literary rules misapplied or unduly revered’. These included the split infinitive, insistence on from after different, aversion to putting a preposition at the end of a sentence, and the idea that two consecutive metaphors are necessarily ‘mixed’ (see metaphor and simile ²). To these may now be added the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb, insistence that none is always singular, and insistence that agenda, data, and other such words are always plural. (Capital letters indicate items that will be found as other entries in this book.)