Word for attaching blame to inanimate objects
In a recent court case in Darlington, a man was convicted of destroying a door with a machete. He was sentenced to some trifling inconvenience, but the magistrates were careful to order the destruction of the machete; clearly they have identified the real culprit, and have ensured no further offences will be possible.
The same thought processes were embedded in English law up to 1846 in the notion of the deodand, some object that caused a death and was therefore forfeit to the Crown.
The fellow who tripped over his shoelace and destroyed some crockery was quick to blame his shoelace; having just converted Ming vases worth £500,000 to fragments worth £diddly he was probably rather shocked and thinking in an instinctive way.
This thought process is sufficiently old and common to have a name. Does anyone know what it is? (I don't think animism quite covers it.)
The pathetic fallacy is:
the treatment of inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thought, or sensations
"Scapegoating" - though usually assigned to a person, can certainly be assigned to an inanimate object. The point is that the blame is passed onto someone/something other than the true perpetrator.
Definition of "scapegoat" from The Free Dictionary.com:
- One that is made to bear the blame of others.
- Bible - A live goat over whose head Aaron confessed all the sins of the children of Israel on the Day of Atonement. The goat, symbolically bearing their sins, was then sent into the wilderness.
tr.v. scape·goat·ed, scape·goat·ing, scape·goats To make a scapegoat of.