GHOST:THE HAUNTING OF OUR LANGUAGE
On Language by Jeffery McQuain
" Most individuals arrested by the Government," a Sudanese dissident told ABC News, "are routinely taken to an unmarked building we call ghost houses. In these places all forms of torture are practiced, and sometimes the detainees are killed."
Not only houses, however, are being haunted nowadays. Ghost expressions have been rising rapidly through our language.
The solid word ghostware, for instance, first appeared in computer lingo a few years ago. In 1996, Time magazine's Techwatch included "ghostware: technology that is alive and well today with no one ( almost no one) sensing its presence." Today's spookspeak also contains hypenated compounds. Martha Grimmes, in her haunting 1996 novel "Hotel Paradise," described how a dying flashlight points "its dim ghost-circle at the wall."
Most ghost terms, though, are two-word phrases. The lexiconographer Cynthia Barnhart cites ghost nets, a 1980's term used by environmentalists for the abandoned drift nets that entrap marine life, and ghost children. Writing for The Atlantic Monthly in 1994, Xiao-huang Yin examined China's population problems: "To get around strict child quotas, villagers often fail to register the births of their daughters...In a village near Baoying, in northern Jiansu, I found seven such ghost children."
The first element of these scare words is nothing new. Ghost itself came into Old English as gast, " soul, spirit." Among its varied meanings are a doubled image on the TV screen and an absent student being counted as present.
Other English compounds may include words worth looking at for their intimations of immortality. The lively deadline, for example began as a literal term during the Civil War for the boundary of a prison camp; any prisoner crossing the designated line was shot....
....Next came ghost town and ghostwriter early in this century, but the lexical explosion began just a generation ago. Since the 1960's, ghost feather has been among a dusting of synonyms for "dust bunny," a bit of fluff under furniture. Then ghost time appeared during the Vietnam War as military slang for being off duty, and ghost town was revived to denote a resort area after a busy season...
...The dead-on ghost rider has also been recently revived. This expression, first popularized in the 1949 Western song "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky" by Stan Jones, came back in the early 1990's for insurance fraud; when a bus or tain wreck suddenly produces more victims than actual riders, the added claims are said to come from ghost riders."*
Other transportation terms that have come out of nowhere include ghost train, identifying a train that runs at night to carry convicts or to keep tracks from being shut down by snow. Ghost train is also what London bus drivers call each night's final run, while a ghost station designates an unstaffed or unused train depot.**
Ghost plane, perhaps based on the Flying Dutchman myth of a ghost ship, began in the early 1990's for flights without fliers. During an American Airlines strike in 1993, Michael Riley reported in Time that "angy passengers watched helplessly as ghost planes---no flight attendants, no passengers, just baggage---pulled away from the jammed gates at Dallas-Fort worth International Airport.***
...Soon ghost may be the word to avoid. In the last decade, Wall Street has scared up ghost stock for stock that cannot be delivered because it was sold short without being acquired for delivery. A doctor can perfrom ghost surgery on another physician's patient without that patient's knowledge. In The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary, Paul Dickson reveals that a sandlot baseball game include a ghost runner, an imaginary player to enlarge a team's roster. More recent is the street slang get ghost, a verb phrase meaning " to leave quickly or disappear."
Anne H. Soukhanov, the author of "Word Watch," also calls up ghost band. That musical noun phrase, she explains, conjures a "group, especially one specializing with swing, that still bears the name of the deceased leader and continues to perform with a new leader and chiefly new members, in the manner of the Nelson Riddle Orchestra.
Finally, any unexpected reversal or change of direction is called a Ghost turn. ..."thumbs up"....a modern sense of encouragment.
Other supernatural sayings may soon materialize. In fact, these ghost terms could be just the first part of the phantom menace."
**(Note...There was also a Ghost train in Nazi germany that was used to carry jews escaping out of germany...there was also a movie about this legendary Ghost Train that also carried gypsies...the movie was touched with some comical moments)
*** O'Hare Airport also reported blimps on their radar that a plane was in air traffic air space but no plane actually existed...and these blips were called "ghost planes"...
*New York Times Magazine article September 5, 1999
Jeffery McQuain author of: "Never Enough Words:How Americans Invented Expressions as Ingenious, Ornery, and Colorful as Themselves" and " The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of the Brain Imaging" with Paul M. Matthews
feel free.....
