Errors stick like burrs. Forty years ago, Jimi Hendrix played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock with a good deal of distortion on his guitar, mostly engendered by feedback. Some people, I learn, refer to this inaccurately as phase distortion. Phase distortion cannot of itself be heard, the physicists tell me.
Phase, again, is identified in many minds with faze. Indeed Phaze is a popular trade name for products in fashion, music and photography. Phaze 1 is an alias of the DJ or musician Rupert Parkes, better known as Photek, though not to me.
The word faze has in reality no connection with phase. Its true relations are resolutely unfashionable, indeed mostly obsolete. Faze, also spelled feaze, is nothing more than a variant of feeze. Faze is first found in print in 1830 in the Western Monthly Review, published in Cincinnati and written by Timothy Flint.
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