Bird, I was using the common conotative meaning rather than the denotative meaning such as your research in the ref section of your library produced. I had to learn that in casual conversation the use of the word, artifact, had a strong positive correlaltion with words begining with a-r-c-h-e-o. To the contrary however, in a previous era of my employment, "artifact" was a frequently used word such as when extracting acoustic data of interest from a tape recording from a hydrophone and finding a monochromatic signal of significant power among the typical noises of the sea (dolphin burps, etc) along with p, s, and t waves from seismic events , that spectral "spike" would be refered to as an artifact until or unless it were proved to be of natural origin such as a whale phonation.
Slipshod use of previously precise terms dilutes the usefulness of them and makes clear concise communications more difficult, even between practitioners of a particular sort. At a productive archeological dig some of the "good stuff" that is found may be artifacts and some of it might be fossils or whatever, e.g. arrow heads and scrapers are artifacts but fossils aren't in the strict sense (unless maybe they show marks from butchering or something like that but to the layman the distinction is often lost.
One of my all time pet peeves is a perfectly good descriptive word with direct historical provenance that has been totally misused, and through such over and misuse became redefined and seperated from its direct connection to its historical origins. With no further introduction, I give you "DECIMATE/DECIMATION" such as, the flue bug decimated the school's student population or the storm decimated the town, or Stormin Norman's troups failed to decimate the Republican Guards. The connotative meaning of decimate has become virtually synonomous with obliteration, total destruction, anihilation, to be greased, waxed, wiped out, rubbed out, totally terminated with maximally extreme prejudice. However, the actual pre-coopt overuse/misuse redefinition meaning of the word was quite straight forward and literal. The origin was Roman. If the Romans captured a village and later the locals made trouble for them (heroic resistance fighters perhaps) the Romans would line up every male in the vilage and decimate them, that is count them out by tens and kill every tenth male. To decimate was to lose one in ten, 10%, a tenth, not all or most but just one in ten. The similarity of deci-mate and deci-mal (as in decimal point, decimal fraction, decimal system) is not coincidental as they are variants of the root decem, latin word meaning ten (10).
Of lesser irritation (partially due to the passage of time): Note the resemblance of decem to December. December used to be the tenth month after Septem (7), and Octem (8), and Novem (9) But among other things, some Ceasars named Julius and Agustus came along... and now the month named ten is the twelth, Nine is the eleventh, Eight is the tenth. And Bird, these inconsistancies are artifacts.
Patrick
