ANTHROPOMORPHISM

[Dr. Goodword]

• anthropomorphism •

Pronunciation: æn-thrê-pê-mor-fi-zêm • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun, mass

Meaning: The attribution of human traits to inanimate objects and nonhuman beings, such as animals and gods.

Notes: When a tree sighs, the wind moans, or we speak of the laughter of a gurgling brook, we are engaging in anthropomorphism. If we give our car a name (my friend calls hers "Gertrude"), speak of Fido's yapping as dog talk, or even call God "Father"—we are at it again. This noun is based on the adjective anthropomorphic which also allows a verb, anthropomorphize "to address an inanimate object as though it were human". This is the first word I thought of watching Star Wars for the first time: C3P0 and R2D2 represent the ultimate anthropomorphic characters, machines invested with all the traits of humans (without losing the advantages of machinery).

In Play: In fact, we have to consider whether robots will make today's Good Word irrelevant: "I always leave a few crumbs of candy on the floor to keep our robotic vacuum cleaner happy." For now, this word offers a way to vent our feelings for those we don't like without resorting to four-letter words: "When I refer to Phil Anders as a person, of course, I'm speaking anthropomorphically."

Word History: Today's Good Word comes from Greek anthropomorphos "human in form", a compound made up of anthropos "human being" + morphe "form, shape". Anthropos is also found in anthropology "the study of humans" and misanthrope "people-hater." The stem of morphe appears in the new verb morph "to dissolve one figure into another photographically", isomorphic "identical in form," and polymorphic "having multiple forms," as was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Now a note of great thanks to Christ Stewart, a South African human being in wonderful form who has been sending us fascinating words like today's for years, now.)

[Perry]

Cars, boats and pets seem to be the most frequently anthropomorphised subjects, in my limited expereince. But at least boats don't take umbrage at pets...or dothey?

[gailr]

In my experience, anthropomorphizing a mechanical object is most likely to occur when the machine is not functioning as desired. Hmmm, something to think about...

Anthropomorphism reminds me of another word which I cannot recall or find: altering one's voice to carry on both sides of a "conversation" with an object or a pet.

gailr: Well, now try a search with pet + voice.
google!gailr: Sorry, no results found with that, either.
gailr: Well, you're not very helpful, are you.
google!gailr: Well, *you're* not very good at setting search parameters, are you.

gailr

[Perry]

If a word doesn't exist for it, let us declare this to be anthropomorphic polylaryngalism.

[gailr]

If a word doesn't exist for it, let us declare this to be anthropomorphic polylaryngalism.

Good suggestion, but could "polylaryngalism" be a description of this technique as well?

[Perry]

But they have so many words for that kind of singing, let us keep the term for ourselves.

[gailr]

So let it be written.

[Bailey]

This isn't a clever dialog or some funny, 'giving life to a cute software' but I watch the Africam a lot, it's a camera trained on a waterhole on a game preserve in Africa on Wavelit.com, and there is a herd of elephants and one lone male who comes to the waterhole all by himself and I feel sorry for him, He obviously misses the herd. He goes to the hole late at night or when the others aren't there. I see where it seems to be hoping the herd will show up, he'll stand there trunk dragging in the water just waiting. He never splashes himself just drinks and lumbers off at night.
I keep thinking he's probably depressed at not having a herd of his own. I know I'm anthropomorthizing over him,

mark just-a-softie Bailey
[there's lots of zebras, Birds, Wildebeasts, deer, hyena, etc. there too]

[Perry]

My bad luck. The one time I had a look, there were no critters at the waterhole. It took me a good long while to understand what I was even looking at.

Not slow with the synapses, just poor picture quality on the website.

[Bailey]

There is a 6 hour time difference by 12:30pm my time [Eastern], it's dark, I get up early and watch a bit, a monkey was in the forefront today at 7:30am.

mark what-ever-floats-your-boat Bailey

[skinem]

Bailey, that's a pretty neat website, in my opinion.

By the way, back on topic (sort of), sorry.
Talking to some, um, ahem, "experienced" citizens, many of them seem to blame Walt Disney for the increased societal anthropormorphism of animals, starting with "Bambi". I'm of an age that I used to LOVE their nature shorts which usually came on before a feature film. Looking back at those now, they were HIGHLY anthropomorphized, attaching a lot of human emotion to them.

I'll have to ask my dog, Flash, what he thinks about the subject. He's pretty smart, and fairly objective.

[Bailey]

I shouldn't have posted the site, it's overloaded, exceeded it's bandwidth, and I can't access it now.

mark no-more-monkeys-sigh Bailey