Psychosomatic Flashpoint

I read an article about John C. Reilly the other day, and I realized that I find it strangely comforting whenever his ugly South Side mug shows up in a movie. Anyway, he’s in the new summer mega-comedy with Will Ferrell, “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,’’ in which they both play race-car drivers. and the article talks about how Will and others were impressed during filming with Reilly’s consistent ability to improvise a punch-line. In the example the article gives, Reilly’s driving partner, Ferrell (the titular Ricky Bobby), is diagnosed with a “psychosomatic” problem, and Reilly says “When you say psychosomatic, do you mean you can start a fire with your mind?” Now, I have no idea if this movie is going to be any good or not, but over the last couple of days I’ve been chuckling to myself every time I think of this line. This suggests that psychosomatic may have to go on the list of funny words, near the top of which, if I remember correctly from an old Walther Matthau/George Burns movie that addressed the subject, is the word “alka seltzer.” Last night Ferrell was on Leno, in character as Ricky Bobby, drawling his credo: "I piss excellence, and crap patriotism." That made me laugh too.

The other “Word Watch” moment for today’s post goes back a few weeks, but it’s been bugging me so I may as well get it off my chest. In an article in the New York Times on the controversial rush to establish ethanol factories, the Times author writes:

“Even in the small town of Hereford, in the middle of the Texas Panhandle's cattle country and hundreds of miles from the agricultural heartland, two companies are rushing to build plants to turn corn into fuel.

As a result, Hereford has become a flashpoint in the ethanol boom that is helping to reshape part of rural America's economic base.”

The word in question, as my helpful bold-facing suggests, is “flashpoint.” In context, the author seems to intend the word to mean something like “a site of controversy.” But what it actually means is this:

flash point also flash·point (fl sh point )
n.
1. The lowest temperature at which the vapor of a combustible liquid can be made to ignite momentarily in air.
2. The point at which eruption into significant action, creation, or violence occurs: "The shootdown did not increase international tensions to the flash point" Seymour M. Hersh.
[Free On-line Dictionary]

The first meaning shows the word’s origin as a term from chemistry, and the second shows a more generalized application to political events. But the key thing here is that when the term is used properly the “point” in question is a point in time not space! I’m sorry to say, though, that the mistaken “spatial” use of the term seems to be cropping up more and more often these days.
(The Times article is called “THE ENERGY CHALLENGE: A Modern Gold Rush; For Good or Ill, Boom in Ethanol Reshapes Economy of Heartland,” but since it’s a few weeks old you can only get it if you’re a TimesSelect member.)