I think it should be "relic-ed"; when it's spelled "reliced", it looks to my eye like it should be pronounced "re-LICED", which doesn't sound appealing at all! 
Who is Billy Zoom?
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Jul 3, 2008 5:23 p.m. PaoloGregorio:
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Jul 3, 2008 5:25 p.m. TAG4:
Wenzel, Jukebox--The reason I never heard of Billy Zoom probably was because He played in a "Cult LA Punk Band." There are probably a lot of those I wouldn't be familiar with...I think "CULT," "LA," or "PUNK" would have thrown me off!
TAG4
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Jul 3, 2008 5:49 p.m. Proteus:
Relicked is another possibility.
But who even wants something that was licked the first time, much less re-licked?
And who did the lickings?
Doesn't sound sanitary.
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Jul 3, 2008 5:52 p.m. Hobie:
Reliked is my preferred;
re-liced; infestation
re-licked; perverse behaviour, fetish
re-liked; to make a new look pre loved or re loved
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Jul 3, 2008 8:44 p.m. BillyZoom:
Perhaps we should say distressed, or antiqued. There's no past tense for relic that looks right.
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Jul 3, 2008 10:25 p.m. billydlight:
relic'd
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Jul 3, 2008 10:27 p.m. Proteus:
Or relicated.
"Distressed" is certainly the term used in the furniture industry, but the guitar manufacturers do call them relics, thus the search for other forms.
But it's a matter of small moment.
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Jul 3, 2008 10:50 p.m. Mark Synchro:
My vote is for relic'd.
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Jul 3, 2008 11:05 p.m. Timthom62:
Looking at some of the more extreme examples, (Strummer Tele, for instance), you'd think "Slap Wore Out" would cover it. The problem is that they're not.
The question of tense for the word "relic" is one I'd never encountered until I came to the GDP. When I first saw it a "reliced", I was a bit taken aback to think that someone would go to all the trouble of putting lice into a guitar, a mod I wasn't familiar with, particularly after having apparently gone to the trouble of removing them in the first place.
I had been trying to work around it with cumbersome phrases like "given the relic treatment" until I just gave up, but if we're taking a vote then "relic'd" would be my preference.
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Jul 3, 2008 11:17 p.m. Wishinfora(nother)Falcon:
Speaking of the Joe Strummer Relic, I played one for the first time last week. It felt OK but that has got to be the worst looking (obviously fake) relicing (sp?) job I have ever seen or could imagine. If you can make it look natural, Great, if not, don't waste your time. IMHO
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Jul 4, 2008 8:39 a.m. Scott:
My vote is for buying one new without any dings, etc. and "personalizing" it myself. But I'm apparently in the minority these days...
Edited because at first "personalizing" was "trashing".
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Jul 4, 2008 9:15 a.m. Proteus:
To be even more analytical, the problem is not just of a family of tenses for "relic," it's that we've changed its gender. I don't believe the word was ever a verb till we got hold of it.
If it was, it would already have had tenses that would raise none of our eyebrows, even if they were weirdly connotative or bastardly irregular. We'd already be used to them through common usage.
In other arenas of human endeavor, new things which look old and worn are called frauds, fakes, forgeries, reproductions, and props.
I submit that owners of relic guitars (the word is also uncomfortable as an adjective) should call their cases "reliquaries."
Half the definitions of the term itself carry connotations of extreme and sometimes weirdly morbid hero worship (or plain ol' worship of divinity), which many guitarists would not wish to ascribe to their relationship with their guitars, or their distant, commercially fabricated "relationship" with the original owner of the guitar on which theirs is modeled.
Or at least they wouldn't admit to them in public, and/or probably haven't given them any thought.
But the use of the term (and was it someone at FMIC who first came up with "Relic" as a marketing term for a level of distress in forged old guitars?) is consistent with a long-noted and common trend in modern consumer culture to conflate the divine, the merely (or wishfully) famous, and the commercial.
Individuals of wide renown (or intense cult adulation) are raised to the level of secular divinity (even as the concept of divinity is discounted, deconstructed, or democratized), and brand names and associated products become holy names.
Icon - relic - hero - totem - guitar "god" - star - mojo - all terms borrowed from mythic and religious vocabulary and transplanted into the daily world of commerce. What once was evangelism is now marketing; in fact, the religious term is commonly used in business.
The human impulse to create significant connections to a wider context (either real or imagined) breaks out all over the place. You can't tamp down the impulse to worship, and if we don't do it on Sunday, we do it with our manufactured stuff and spread it out all over the week.
Shoot, I don't know. Since the best of our "products" represent mankind's creativity, ingenuity, industry, rage for order, apprehension of and quest for beauty - not to mention our embodiment of the laws and stuff of the natural universe as we understand it - maybe it's better that way.
I still say beautiful and useful made things, which turn the stuff of nature to our purposes, are among the highest and most "sacred" attainments of the human race – particularly when they are intended for the most ephemeral art of painting in time with harmonious vibrations. They're our revenge on a natural "order" which makes us possible but doesn't care whether we thrive or not.
In that sense, everything we humans leave behind are relics in the truest sense.
A great race once lived here. We know because we've found their guitars.
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Jul 4, 2008 11:54 a.m. seadevil:
Warning: Pedantic hijack ahead!!
Proteus, it is surprising that a writer of your eloquence and precision (and frequent lack of concision!) would misuse the word "gender". Words do not have gender as parts of speech in English, even if they connote or denote gender on the part of the entity described. Even if words did have gender, it would be irrelevant here. It is the word's usage, application, function as a part of speech, or perhaps even class, that is being altered. I don't know that there is a universally agreed-upon term for what is changed when a noun is "verbed" in this way, but "gender" ain't it.
Also, "everything... are relics"? Tsk, tsk! Tense, anyone?
Bonus for grammar geeks: find the "Oxford comma" in the first paragraph. Thurber would have hated it.
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Jul 4, 2008 12:12 p.m. PaoloGregorio:
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Jul 4, 2008 12:21 p.m. PaoloGregorio:
I'd vote for "distressed/antiqued"-it makes the most sense, and the form and tense already exist.
"relic'd" is incorrect grammar.
Good point that "relic" is being used as a verb, which is a new use for the term.
"Relic'd" though a creative solution for the lack of a correct, existing past tense of "relic", would be improper grammar, as the correct use of the apostrophe is to indicate the possessive form of the word; "Relic'd" would mean, "belonging to the relic", which is not what we're trying to express.
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Jul 4, 2008 12:25 p.m. BillyZoom:
When I was a young man, disrespect was a noun and gender was permanently assigned. Things change. Life moves faster now. No one has time to wear out their own guitar? BZ
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Jul 4, 2008 12:27 p.m. PaoloGregorio:
Very true!
I've managed to put some wear on the backside of my Silver Jet, along with a few dings in the neck and the headstock. the nice thing about the Sparkly front is that is has layers of clear coat, and tons of sparkle, so dinging up the front side of the body is nearly impossible!
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Jul 4, 2008 12:29 p.m. TAG4:
What about "relicKED?"
TAG4
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Jul 4, 2008 12:40 p.m. PaoloGregorio:
I just thought of a form that would work, and would cause no grammatical quandaries or confusion of pronunciation: "relicized", which would be pronounced "reli-sized", which is a relatively common form and pronunciation when treating similar words to the same tense change.
My vote would still be for "distressed" or "antiqued" however, since these are already established terms for the process applied to a finished surface in order to give it the appearance of an aged relic.
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Jul 4, 2008 1:26 p.m. Mark Synchro:
seadevil said: function as a part of speech, or perhaps even class
This is my nominee for Oxford comma. -
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Jul 4, 2008 1:31 p.m. Proteus:
Why seadevil, I didn't know you cared so much!
You're quite right that parts of speech are not denominated sexually in English (or any language of which I'm aware, for that matter). But since in many languages nouns are (sometimes comically) genderized, I can see where my usage may have seemed imprecise, and gosh do I regret that.
The intention in suggesting a part of speech had been sex-changed was to be mildly amusing. But alas, my experience with romance languages has been so traumatic, I apparently blanked it out when posting and thus didn't even consider the potential for confusion and subsequent penalties for sloppiness. Mea culpa.
That faux pas aside, I did think that before we conjugated the relic, we ought to pause and consider its new identity in the verb camp - and ask whether we ought to allow such a venerable word to make such a sneaky move.
As to your second red mark, I pondered over the agreement in number between "everything" and "relics," but I don't see a problem of tense - at least not in terms of the point I intentionally intended to intend. That is, that all that human beings corporeally are, and all that we materially make, is destined for and in a sense attains relic status from the time it is created. To the extent that a physical thing remains extant from moment to moment through time, it was, is, and will be a relic and thus transcends tense (at least until it finally ceases to be). I think that implied transcendance of time is one of the conceptual/symbolic/spiritual functions of a relic, be it a saint's femur or a battered guitar.
But I'll grant that "everything are" sure sounds clumsy, and may represent a terrible disagreement in number. As I debated over it, I remembered that British and Murrikin English have different rules for agreement in number of noun and verb for many collective nouns. Brits will say "the Academy do not approve such a usage," respecting the individuals within the academy as constituent members of the collective denoted by the noun, whereas we Yanks would say "the Academy DOES not approve, considering the academy as a monolithic singular noun.
I had hoped my "everything are" construction might slip in under that convention.
I guess in American, "everything," though it denotes an obvious multitude, is a singular noun, and I should have said "everything IS"...but what? "Everything is relic" (singular), or "everything is relics" (plural)? Both seemed either wrong or not to say what I meant. That way madness laid.
So I opted for the admittedly ungrammatical and clumsy phrase I used - but at least not without agonizing over it.
It was, despite its defects, the most concise way to say what I intended. In retrospect, maybe "all the things...are relics" would have been better.
You've out-grammar-nerded me on the comma, though!
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Jul 4, 2008 1:50 p.m. PaoloGregorio:
Jane Wiedlin had, and may still have, an original, double cutaway silver Jet.
Man, how did I miss "X" on Letterman?! I must have been working late that night.
The tone is great.
Other songs in which BZ's riffs and general tone stick in my head from that haven't been mentioned:
"In this House That I Call Home"
"The Hungry Wolf"- I like the feedback part in the middle as well.
Oh, and this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRWunSUmEm4&feature=related
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Jul 5, 2008 12:55 p.m. seadevil:
Mark, that is an oxford comma... sort of. It was trick question, because neither that comma nor the one preceding it is strictly required. Here's a clearer example of the most frequently appearing Oxford comma:
"Grammarians, academics, and scholars everywhere debate its merits."
It's typically the last comma in a list - in this case, the one before the "and". Some (like me) argue that it makes such a sentence clearer. Without it, the sentence implies that the academics and scholars do not debate individually, but only as a pair.
The one you noted was not strictly necessary, true, but I'm not completely sure that that alone qualifies it as an Oxford comma.
There's another weakness in that sentence: "or perhaps class" can be read as belonging to "a word" OR "function as a..." OR "function as a part of...". Very bad syntax. I apologize.
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Jul 6, 2008 12:39 a.m. Mark Synchro:
I used to use Oxford commas all the time, I guess I wanted to prove to any and all that I was completely "on" with the comma thing and would use them whenever I could. Well, it, got, tiring, after, a, while,,,, so I decided to give up the Oxford commas and live life on the edge. At first it was scary, but now I can go bungee jumping or parasailing, do deep technical dives with mixed gases and brave the mosh pit at any concert. OK, none of that is true from the word bungee onward and I actually prefer single strand tie-downs which are supposed to be called straight cords.
Anyhow, back to the Oxford comma. You're argument of greater clarity has not fallen upon deaf ears and I will repent in sackcloth and ashes. From now on it's commas, commas, and more commas; at least for me.
Punctuationally yours, Mark Synchro
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Jul 6, 2008 3:20 a.m. Timthom62:
My idiosyncratic punctuation, particularly regarding the use of commas and semicolons, drives my wife crazy. I've tried to explain that I'm attempting to counterbalance E.E. Cummings, but she will hear none of it. She has a B.A. in English, and, should you ever hear that I have been beaten to death with a copy of Mssrs. Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style", you'll know who done it.
