Mountweazel
(pronounced mount-wee-zuhl)
Factitious
material deliberately included in a publication as a “copyright trap”, allowing
identification of plagiarism and potential violations of copyright.
1975: A definition
by Henry Alford (b 1962) which appeared in a 1975 edition of The New Yorker, referencing an entry in the fourth edition (1975) of the New Columbia Encyclopedia,
involving the fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, said to have died in an
explosion while on assignment for the just as fanciful “Combustibles” magazine. Mountweazel was not a legitimate family name,
the neologism coined by Karen Tweedy-Holmes (b 1942), then an editor for the encyclopedia,
the purpose being a fictional biographical entry for the imaginary Lillian
Virginia Mountweazel. For all purposes (other
than the doomed heroine), mountweasel is used without an initial capital. Mountweazel is a noun; the noun plural is mountweazels.
Ms
Tweedy-Holmes (there can have been few finer names for a lexicographer)
described her tragic heroine as an American fountain designer turned
photographer, born in 1942 in Bangs, Ohio and most noted for her commissioned
series of images of the mailboxes of rural America, her death said to have come
in 1973. Ms Tweedy-Holmes authoritative (and
wholly bogus) biographical entry for the late Ms Mountweazel read: “Mountweazel,
Lillian Virginia, 1942–1973, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography
in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra
Miwok in 1964. She was awarded
government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter,
including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris and rural American
mailboxes. The last group was exhibited
extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972). Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while
on assignment for Combustibles magazine.” The coining was for the purpose of a
“copyright trap”, in this context an apparently legitimate dictionary entry
structurally and stylistically indistinguishable from thousands of others, the
idea being that were another publication to include a “Lillian Virginia
Mountweazel” entry with the same “facts”, that obviously would be a plagiarism
and potentially a breach of copyright.
Ms
Mountweazel may never have lived but in death is memorialized in the Lillian Virginia Mountweazel Research Collection which includes an “extensive collection of Combustibles Magazine”
covers, some editions including her assignments, notably “the whimsical history of fireworks”
and “disturbing
revelations” about Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun
(1912–1977) who in 1945 had been employed by the US government, suddenly rather
more interested in the missiles the German could help them build rather than
his wartime use of slave labor. There’s also the
revelation the Flags Up! project,
although promoted as the USPS (US Postal Service) using “captivating imagery” to demonstrate
how the new ZIP codes enhanced “the efficiency and modernization of the postal system”,
actually was funded by the CCF (Congress for Cultural Freedom), a CIA (Central
Intelligence Agency) “front organization” used during the Cold War to produce
anti-Soviet propaganda. The “messaging”
in Flags Up! was to show the way
freedom of thought and the expression of ideas was allowed freely to flow between Americans, however remote they might be. Of course, also included is the “special issue” of Combustibles (4 June, 1973) in which was announced
the death the previous day of Ms Mountweazel, killed in the crash of a Soviet
Tupolev Tu-144 SST (supersonic transport) passenger airliner during the 1973
Paris Air Show at Le Bourget Airport. In the accident, all six crew members died along
with eight in the nearby village of Goussainville, Val-d'Oise where Ms
Mountweasel had been researching “the negative health effects of sound pollution in
communities near major international airports.” After her death, photojournalism scholar Pierre Menard, acknowledged
Ms Mountweazel as “one of the most important in the world of pyromaniac
publishing.” Pierre Menard
was also factitious, the name borrowed from Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote (Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote), a short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986).
While there was no “Combustibles” magazine (although there would seem to be a need for one), for students of such
things or enthusiasts of the art & science of “blowing-up stuff”, the (IEE) Institute of Explosives Engineers (Voice of the Explosive Industries) publishes
the quarterly Official Journal of the
Institute of Explosives Engineers, currently distributed to a membership of
some 2,000 “highly qualified engineers
and specialists” involved in blowing-up stuff. Additionally, copies are made available to
selected academics, professional institutions and those in the business (of
blowing-up stuff). As well as academic
papers, features and articles, the journal functions as a trade publication
with information and reviews of new products and services. The editors welcome submissions relevant to
blowing-up stuff and, if appropriate, prior to publication, will submit texts
for professional peer review. The next International
Explosives Conference will be held between 16-18 June, 2026 at the Parkgate
Hotel in Cardiff, Wales and the institute recommends the early booking of hotel
rooms because on the evening of the 16th, Take That (an English pop group formed in Manchester in 1990) will
be performing their Circus Live show
at the city’s Principality Stadium.
A synonym of
mountweazel is the German Nihilartikel,
said to have appeared in 2003 as a hoax in the German-language Wikipedia in
2003 and later picked up by the English version from which it spread through blogs,
print publications and such, these serving as “references” appearing to
legitimate subsequent use. The construct
of Nihilartikel (being a noun, if
used in the original German, with an initial upper case) was the Latin nihil (nothing), from nihilum (from ne- (not) + hīlum (the least bit)) + the German Artikel (article) (from the Middle High
German artikel, from the Latin articulus. This
is defined (in the jargon of Wikipedia) as a type of citogenesis (a circular
form of citation where various sources report each other, creating a false
impression of reliability). The
construct being cit(e) + -o- + -genesis, citogenesis
was in 2011 coined by US engineer Randall Munroe (b 1984), presumably on the model
of the homophone cytogenesis (the formation, development and variation of
cells), the construct being cyto- + genesis.
Cyto- (“cell” as used in biology) was a learned borrowing from the Ancient
Greek κύτος (kútos) (container,
receptacle) and genesis (origin, start; point (in time) at which something
comes into being). came via Latin from the Ancient Greek γένεσις (génesis). Cite (in
this context “to quote; to repeat, to make mention of; to list”) was
from the Old French citer, from the Latin citare (to cause to move, excite,
summon) and frequentative of ciēre (to
rouse, excite, call). So, just as cytogenesis
describes cells being formed and variations emerging from components, in citogenesis what is happening to the
assembly of “apparent (but erroneous) facts” with “authenticity verified” on
the basis of other “apparent (but erroneous) facts that gained their “apparent
veracity” merely from the frequency of citation.
The
Pentagon Papers.
In
1971, the USSC (US Supreme Court) ruled 6-3 against granting the Nixon (Richard
Nixon (1913-1994; US VPOTUS 1953-1961 & POTUS 1969-1974)) administration an
injunction preventing further publication excerpts of the documents by the New
York Times & The Washington Post, holding the government’s attempt to
invoke “prior
restraint” violated the First Amendment (freedom of the press) of
the constitution and the claim of a threat to national security was not in this
case sufficiently justified to allow suppression of the press. It’s interesting to speculate how today’s
USSC would rule on the same facts.For other
purposes, there are variants of the “copyright trap”. Organizations wishing to detect the source of
“leaks” (documents being photocopied and given to unauthorized recipients)
would sometimes make visually almost imperceptible changes (an additional
space, a character in a slightly different font etc) in certain copies, meaning
an analysis of a “leaked copy” could isolate the source. That obviously depended on the existence of
relatively few original copies but that is the nature of leaked material. The digitization of documents of course made
copying and leaking not only quicker and easier but also made possible grabbing
data on a huge scale. While in 1969 Dr Daniel
Ellsberg (1931–2023) had to spend several evenings alone with one of Rand
Corporation’s photocopiers to duplicate the 7000-odd pages that became “the Pentagon Papers”, by the time Edward
Snowden (b 1983) and Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning (b 1987) were stealing US
government data by the gigabyte, all they needed was a USB stick onto which
stuff silently was copied as they went about their paid work. All digital copies of a document are of
course functionally identical and even metadata which can reveal something
about the copying (such as a date stamp) can be edited so what sometimes was
done was the insertion of something hidden which could be detected only at the
software level and not visually. The
best known was the “Alt + 255 trick”, a keyboard combination which created the
NBSP (non-breaking space) Unicode character U+00A0. Visually indistinguishable from the standard
gap (U+0020) created by a tap of the space bar, the location could be detected
using certain text editors so, correctly implemented, it would be a useful
device for tracing sources of leaks.
However, “software tricks” can be detected by other software which is
why crooked Hillary Clinton’s (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) legal
team (a well-resourced and busy crew) insisted on printing out thousands of
E-mails because of fears the investigators exploring the (still not adequately explained)
“servergate” scandal might detect in the raw files something crooked Hillary
had deleted.
The
companion (in form though not intent) of the mountweazel is the “ghost
word”. A ghost word is a word that
enters a dictionary, reference book or some other reputable source, despite
being “wrong”. The causative events have
been varied, including misunderstood abbreviations, typographical errors,
printer's mistakes, errors in transcription or translation, scribal copying
errors, damaged manuscripts, corruptions in transmission and mishearings of audio
recordings. While advances in technology
have made it possible more efficiently to identify ghost words, the increasing
use of OCR (optical character recognition) on texts of sometimes dubious
legibility may yet create a few and given the propensity of AI (artificial
intelligence) bots to “make-up stuff”, there’s likely to be a new generation yet
to be discovered. In linguistics, the
professionals distinguish between “ghost words” and “phantom words” and the
distinction matters in their rarefied world but to most of us the latter
probably would be thought mere “spelling errors”.
Few have made a great as contribution to the study of the English language as
Walter William Skeet, the ghost word but one of his minor legacies.
All that
matters for purposes of definition is that the word has no actual history of
use in the language. One celebrated
example was “dord” which appeared in the 1934 edition of Webster's New
International Dictionary, defined as “density”.
What had happened was the chemistry section’s editor had written a note
saying: “D or
d, cont/ density” (meaning “uppercase D or lowercase d is the
abbreviation for density”) but a typesetter misread the spaces, blending the
characters to create a “new word”. Until
1939 “dord” sat on its page in Webster’s, apparently without causing trouble
but it was noticed during an internal review and a “plate change/imperative/urgent”
instruction was sent to the printer; at that point the linguistic exorcism was
effected but, because lead-times and product supply-lines were then longer, not
until 1947 were Webster’s confident they successfully had “de-dorded”
things. It could of course have been
different. Had chemists ((The origin,
start; point (in time) at which something comes into being). or anyone else)
decided dord was a “perfectly cromulent word” and use had achieved
critical mass, it would have become a “real word”. Quite when the term “ghost word” first was
used in this sense is uncertain but lexicographers agree it was popularized by English mathematician, philologist & Anglican deacon Walter William Skeat (1835–1912), notable for
his seminal work in editing Medieval texts.
The neologism “cromulent” appeared in Lisa the Iconoclast (episode 16, season 7 of the US animated TV series The Simpsons (1989-) which aired on Fox on 18 February, 1996. Cromulent (acceptable; valid; correct) was deliberately not “a real word”, the gag being it was included in the script to be used by one character to assure another that “embiggen” (to make larger) was “a real word”. So it was a funny line but the irony was embiggen had a (limited) history of use dating from 1884. In the years since, it has been included in mainstream dictionaries and has found a niche in the mysterious world of string theory, a collection of explanations of the structure of the universe; being under the rubric of quantum gravity, string theory is understood only by a handful of specialists, not all of whom agree with each other. Probably few would deny embiggen deserves to be in the jargon of string theory but whether the discipline is cromulent science continues to divide opinion.
Warren
Harding (1865–1923; POTUS 1921-1923), New Year's Day, 1920.
Harding presided over a scandal-plagued administration and his early
death might have been one of those “good
career moves”. Theodore Roosevelt’s (TR,
1858–1919; POTUS 1901-1909) daughter Alice Longworth (1884–1980) “knew everybody” in twentieth century US
politics and in summing up Harding concluded: “Harding wasn’t a bad man, he was just a
slob.”
There have over
the years been many “ghost words” (the authoritative Wiktionary listing 33
instances in English of examples meeting their strict criterion). It’s not enough that a word is “wrong”; whether
fictitious, malicious, erroneous or whatever, to become a “ghost word” it must
in some work of reference be presented as “genuine” and in that form endure
long enough to take on some sort of life.
Humorists and experimentalists have of course coined or repurposed words
which have entered mainstream use but these are not ghost words because their
lineage was documented. There are also “pseudo
ghost words” (those treated as such but with a verified history authenticating
the alleged error), a celebrated example being Warren Harding’s use during his successful 1920 presidential campaign of “normalcy”
instead of “normality”, the section
of his speech containing the offending word was almost aggressively
alliterative:
“America’s present
need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution,
but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not
the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence
in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”
Unrelated: The mountain weasel (Mustela altaica), an inhabitant of high-altitude regions in parts of Asia including Kazakhstan, Tibet, India, Mongolia, north-eastern China and southern Siberia.
In saying
"normalcy", he may have misspoken or perhaps Harding liked the word;
questioned afterwards he said he found it in a dictionary which probably was
true although whether his discovery came before or after the speech wasn't
explored. Although Harding’s choice was
much-derided at the time, normalcy had certainly existed since at least 1857,
originally as a technical term from geometry meaning the “mathematical
condition of being at right angles, state or fact of being normal in geometry”
but subsequently it had on several occasions appeared in print as a synonym of
normality. Still, it was hardly in
general use though Harding gave it a boost and it’s not since gone extinct, now
with little complaint except from the most linguistically fastidious who insist
the use in geometry remains the only meaning and all subsequent applications are
mistakes. In these circumstances, a
misspeak “does not a ghost word always make”. At
the time, many assumed Mr Harding had “misspoken”. For someone to “misspeak” was then understood
to mean “saying something incorrectly, unclearly or inaccurately (by mistake). Misspeak thus distinguished unintentional
errors, mispronunciations or “slips of the tongue” from deliberate lies.
“Misspeak” had enjoyed a darkly amusing late career change. Historically, it meant (1) to fail to
pronounce, utter, or speak correctly or (2) to speak insultingly, disrespectfully
or inappropriately ( a use long obsolete) but in recent decades it has evolved as a “weasel word” (a
word used to hedge a statement, making it vague; equivocal; ambiguous;
misleading) used by politicians and others tacitly to admit having lied without
having to say: “I lied”. So it’s beyond a
euphemism (which has a hint of polite respectability) and something most
associated with crooked Hillary Clinton, notorious for her “strained”
relationship with truthfulness although to be fair to crooked Hillary (difficult,
but it can be done), her husband (Bill Clinton (b 1946; POTUS 1993-2001)) did
not in such matters set a stellar example.
Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.
A malapropism
is a literary device and not a ghost word.
Mrs Malaprop was a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s (1751-1816)
play The Rivals (1775); she had the habit
of substituting inappropriate but like-sounding words that would take on a
ludicrous meaning in the sentence in which they appeared (her intended
compliment “nice
arrangement of epithets” came from her lips as “nice derangement of epitaphs”). That was very different from a “mere typo”, a
breed which tends either to be annoying or amusing but which in certain
documents could be consequential (consider “prescribe” vs “proscribe”) but
typos can also coin words. “Hodling” was
intended to be in the text string “I am
holding”, typed by a cryptocurrency investor who wished to assure others in
the chatgroup he was “holding” his Bitcoin position and not selling despite the
sudden drop in the price. Unfortunately,
he’d reputedly enjoyed half a bottle of whisky (or whiskey) so finger control
on the keyboard was diminished, thus the word-making “I am hodling.” That proved a linguistic gift because “hodl”
(hold) entered the jargon of the cryptocoin jockeys and hodlers (those who do
not react to every price downturn by selling) are thought a fearless elite.
Applied spoonerism: First assembled in 1977, the
Cunning Stunts was a London-based,
feminist performance collective. Suffering the internal conflicts perhaps endemic to collectives, the
Cunning Stunts dissolved in 1982, having seemingly worked their concept dry. In the UK, much alternative theatre didn’t survive the 1980s, the administration of Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013; UK prime-minister 1979-1990) dismantling many of the often left-wing local authorities which had provided a substantial proportion of the funding.
Nor is a spoonerism
likely to become a ghost phrase. A spoonerism
is a play on words in a phrase in which the initial (typically a consonant)
sounds of two or more of the words are transposed. It was named after Oxford
don the Reverend W. A. Spooner (1844–1930), who was alleged to have made many
such slip-ups (“Our
dear old queen” becoming “Our queer old dean”) although among scholars it’s
suspected that while doubtless he made a few, there was likely a healthy
industry among his students (and perhaps even his fellow dons) is concocting a more
to be attributed. Another variant was
the mondegreen. Mondegreen was coined by
US editor & journalist Sylvia Wright (1917-1981) who, in a piece published
in 1954 in Harper's Magazine, recalled a childhood memory of mishearing her
mother read a line in the Scottish ballad The
Bonnie Earl o' Moray (which appeared in Reliques
of Ancient English Poetry (1765) by the English clergyman bishop and
antiquarian Thomas Percy (1729-1811)): “They have slain the Earl o' Moray, / And laid him on the
green”, the second line misheard as, “And Lady Mondegreen”. Now an acknowledged descriptor, “mondegreen” didn’t
appear in mainstream dictionaries until the twenty-first century and that was a
product of lists of “obscure or unusual” words beginning to proliferate on the
internet as bandwidth increased and cost fell.
Not all novelties pleased the editors but mondegreen was nerdy enough to
make the lexicographical cut. Structurally, there’s no reason why
a misspeak, malaproprism, spoonerism or mondegreen can’t become a ghost word;
it’s all in the history.
Peter Falk
as Lieutenant Columbo in his battered 1959 Peugeot 403
Cabriolet.
Both
embiggen and cromulent are not ghost words because they were positioned as
“joke words” rather than being errors and nor are they mountweazels because
they were inserted into the script as something other than copyright traps. Essentially, a mountweazel deliberately is fake
while a ghost word is in some sense “wrong”, the distinction summed up as: (1) a
ghost word is an error mistaken for truth while (2) a mountweazel is a
fabrication presented as truth for strategic reasons. There are however limitations to the
mountweazel’s utility as a copyright trap, the classic example the legal
squabble which came to be dubbed “the Columbo Trap”. Columbo was a TV detective drama which at
various times between 1968-2003 was shown on the NBC & ABC networks; it
started Peter Falk (1927–2011) as Lieutenant Columbo, remembered for (1) always
solving the murder(s), (2) his catch phrase “just one more thing” and (3)
driving a dilapidated 1959 Peugeot 403 Cabriolet (one of 504 built than year
out of the 2,030 made during a five-year run (1956-1961)).
The first
edition of the best-selling book The
Trivia Encyclopedia appeared in 1974; written by Fred L. Worth, it was for years
a fixture on bookshop “Christmas gift” lists.
In 1984, claiming damages of US$300 million, Mr Worth filed suit against
the distributors of the board game Trivial
Pursuit, claiming they had stolen their game’s questions from his books. There were many instances of copying he cited
but his key piece of evidence was a mountweazel in his book: the “trivial fact”
the first name of the TV detective Lieutenant Colombo was “Philip”. This was a product of Mr Worth’s imagination
but in the board game, it was included as an answer to that question. His legal point was that while the board
game’s creators could have obtained his other examples from many other sources
(as indeed he had), the notion of “Philip Columbo” appeared first in his book
and that it was “not a fact” was irrelevant because the basis of his suit was
the unauthorized and unattributed copying.
On just about any topic, there's probably a trivia list somewhere on-line.
The distributers
of Trivial Pursuit made no attempt to
deny sourcing much material from Mr Worth's book, arguing “facts” are not able
to receive the protection of copyright.
To emphasize the point, the company provided a long list of published
texts from which information had been copied and argued it would be absurd to
suggest they could be sued for providing the answer “Queen Victoria reigned between 1837-1901” because that fact appears
in thousands of books. They acknowledged
an action might be possible (depending on many things) had they merely
published a “book of trivial facts”
(a la Mr Worth’s) but a multi-player board game in which questions had to be
answered was “a
substantially different product” within the meaning of copyright
law. The judge agreed, a finding upheld
on appeal and the USSC declined to re-hear the case, thus
reinforcing general principle “a fact cannot be copyrighted”. Mr Worth’s response was that by definition “Philip
Columbo” was thus a piece of fiction deserving copyright; the courts did not concur. Amusingly however, others
also copied Mr Worth’s mountweazel and references to “Lieutenant Philip Columbo”
over the years appeared in print and on-line, Peugeot in the 1980s even running
advertising campaign in which “Lt. Philip Columbo” was mentioned as the “most famous
driver” of a Peugeot convertible.
That was a bit of a shift from the company’s original views on the 403
Cabriolet’s appearance in the TV series, the executives not best pleased at its
dilapidated state. Internet sleuths
later published close-up screen shots of his police badge which revealed his
name was “Frank
Columbo”.
