Feminism

Feminism (pronounced fem-uh-niz-uhm)

(1) A doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men.

(2) In both its structured and ad hoc forms, a movement for the attainment of such rights for women (sometimes used with initial capital letter).

(3) Feminine character (obsolete except for historic references).

1851: From the French féminisme, ultimately from the Classical Latin fēminīnus, the construct being the Latin fēmina (woman) + ism.  The first known use in French dates from 1837.  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up -ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  It seems first to have been used in in English in 1851, originally as a neutral term meaning "the state of being feminine".  The sense of "advocacy of women's rights" began in 1895 ("political feminism" often traced from here although given the history that is misleading) and the word came soon to be used as a "loaded" descriptor of the female character, a kind of informal measure of the patriarchal view of femininity, often in criticism of artistic performance or literature.  So productive has the word feminism proved that there are literally more than a hundred derived forms including the:  geographical (Afro-feminism; Euro-feminism), political (anarcho-feministic, radical feminism), humorous (femocrat; femnazi), structural (post-feminism; lipstick feminism; postmodern feminism) and contested (male-feminism; trans-feminism).  Feminism & feminist are nouns, feministic is an adjective and feministically is an adverb; the most common noun plural is feminists but given the proliferation of terms created with modifiers, feminisms are often referenced even if the word is not used.

Feminism is a widely used word with an accepted definitional range but there’s no universal understanding pattern of use and, like words such as “academic” or “liberal”, the meaning conveyed widely can vary, the senses ranging from the chauvinistically aggressive to the contemptuous.  That of course transfers to “feminist” which while procedural as an adjective (relating to or in accordance with feminism), as a noun it really means what the user wants it to mean because it’s not like many other “–ist” creations (physicist, scientist etc) which are understood as simple descriptors.  Even “artist” is uncontroversial at the linguistic level (one who creates what they claim to be art) although whether what they produce can be considered “art” might be disputed.  The -ist suffix was from the Middle English -ist & -iste, from the Old French -iste and the Latin -ista, from the Ancient Greek -ιστής (-istḗs), from -ίζω (-ízō) (the -ize & -ise verbal suffix) and -τής (-tḗs) (the agent-noun suffix).  It was added to nouns to denote various senses of association such as (1) a person who studies or practices a particular discipline, (2), one who uses a device of some kind, (3) one who engages in a particular type of activity, (4) one who suffers from a specific condition or syndrome, (5) one who subscribes to a particular theological doctrine or religious denomination, (6) one who has a certain ideology or set of beliefs, (7) one who owns or manages something and (8), a person who holds very particular views (often applied to those thought most offensive).  Feminists have noted the issue, the journalist & author Rebecca West (1892–1983) once remarking: “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or prostitute.”

Feminism & Language

Écriture féminine (feminine writing) was a concept proposed by the French feminist and literary critic Hélène Cixous (b 1937).  It denoted writing characteristically feminine in style, language, tone and feeling; it was wholly different from (and opposed to) male language and discourse although in The Laugh of the Medusa (1976) she acknowledged in this there was no biological determinism; women often writing in “male discourse” while men can write in a “feminine way”. She cited the “source” of écriture féminine in the mother-child relationship before the child acquires “conventional” language and suggested this potential language, when eventually used in writing, (whether by men or women) subverted logic, the rational and any element which may constrain the free play of meaning.  In certain feminist circles, this was intoxicating stuff.

Because of the overlap of terms and labels, it’s important to emphasize Cixous meant something different by “conventional language” than did linguistics theorist & public intellectual Noam Chomsky (b 1928), their intellectual traditions (mostly) separate.  According to Cixous, “convention is a social, cultural, and ideological phenomenon”, her concern being how language reproduces power, (especially that of the patriarchy) and her purpose an intention to disrupt existing constructs of “conventional language”.  By contrast, Chmosky was interested in mechanisms and structure (much of his analysis is gender-neutral).  In his model, “convention” was largely a surface property of particular languages, his interest the innate cognitive system underlying language and his goal an explanation of the way speakers unconsciously acquire the syntax and vocabulary of language.  This was less the “nuts & bolts” of language than how people learn to use them to assemble and convey meaning with “conventional language an outcome of process.

White Ink, Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics (2008), Hélène Cixous, edited by Susan Sellers.

Cixous was thus a critic of “conventional language”, seeing it as a collection of constructs which made up the established forms of discourse inherited from Western culture (most of which was created or propagated by the infamous “dead white males”).  That construct was culturally hegemonic and included (1) accepted literary styles & canonical works, (2) accepted rules of syntax & logic, (3) a limited range of socially sanctioned meanings, (4) binary oppositions that tended to map onto masculine / feminine orthodoxy (reason / emotion,  activity / passivity,  strength / weakness etc) and (5) linguistic habits operating to maintain or reinforce patriarchal authority.  Obviously, none of that could be thought politically neutral and because language is a unique form of communication, being standardized after having been shaped by masculine structures of thought, “conventional language” tended to reproduce existing hierarchies.  Écriture féminine was thus writing exceeding or disrupting the conventional linguistic order, achieved through non-linear structures, ambiguity, excess & rhythm; while those devices and techniques have widely been adopted by many seeking to be disruptive of “something”, what Cixous emphasized was a particular content: bodily imagery & associative movement rather than the rigid logical progression long imposed by the patriarchy.  In other words, Cixous defined “conventional language” as something effectively synonymous with institutionalized discourse or the dominant symbolic order.

Syntactic Structures (1957) by Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky’s work in structural linguistics predated his “second career” as critic of socio-economic structures and US foreign policy and although highly controversial, was little known outside the relatively small community of academics working in the field of linguistics.  In producing his polemical work that was more accessible, he reached a much wider audience and managed to become a “celebrity academic”, a reasonable achievement given he was effectively black-balled by all of the mainstream US media (both “liberal” and “conservative” outlets).  Chomsky’s early work was highly technical (and frankly difficult fully to understand without the requisite training) but it’s clear he viewed “conventional language” as an external social system with the parameters of “convention” understood as the “surface properties” and what really mattered was the innate cognitive system underlying language (the means by which speakers unconsciously acquire conventional languages).  At that point his analysis got really dense and one of the few easily digestible concepts he offered to illustrate things was the distinction between I-language (internal language): the mental grammar possessed by an individual speaker and E-language (external language): English, French, Japanese, etc, viewed as public conventions.  For many of us, it was a rare moment of clarity.

So the use by Cixous and Chomsky of the term “conventional language” is just an example of the way language must in its context be deconstructed for meaning to be understood.  That’s not new and is something that’s been required as soon as words or phrases came to capable of carrying more than one meaning but what can’t be denied is that at some point in the twentieth century, deconstruction became fetishized and once postmodernism taught us even meaning must inherently be thought uncertain, it’s little wonder the factions girded their loins and feminist literature was part of the battle.  Cixous (in translation) and Chomsky of course shared vocabulary, linguistic conventions and sometimes even patterns of argument but their work on language was not even parallel streams but more lakes fed by the same tributaries.  Cixous was there to oppose and Chomsky to explain but he later would discover the joy of discontent.

Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1981) by Toril Moi.

There have of course been many forks of feminist thoughts and Belgian-born French feminist psycholinguist Luce Irigaray (b 1930) wrote of a “woman's language” that was multiple, fluid, diverse and heterogeneous, evading the male phallocentric monopoly (a theory with a morphological basis associated with the structure and shape of the genitalia).  A not unrelated view was proposed by Bulgarian-born French feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (b 1941): a “language” that was pre-Oedipal, pre-linguistic and fundamentally semiotic (associated with the chora, from the Ancient Greek χώρα (khṓra) (location, place (but used here in the sense of “womb”))) as opposed to male-controlled language which she described as symbolic.  That one really disturbed some male critics.  Nearly a half-century on, the classic discussion of these matters (and other competing theories) remains Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1981) by the Norwegian Professor of Literature Toril Moi (b 1953).

A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977) by Elaine Showalter.

One landmark contribution to the development of feminist literary analysis was made by US literary critic Dr Elaine Showalter (b 1941) who in the 1970s coined gynocriticism, describing studies and interpretation focusing on women as writers, as distinct from feminist criticism and evaluation of the work of men.  Showalter explained gynocritics by saying it was a concept within which could be built “a female framework for the analysis of women's literature”.  By the 1970s literary theory had already evolved into separatist forks so the notion of siloing “women on women” as something distinct in the field suited the critical zeitgeist but what lent gynocritics its identity was a distinct sense of the author-centric.  Although a generation after the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s (1908–1986) The Second Sex (1949) that wasn’t exactly new and whether Showalter really had created “new” models of female literary creation could be debated, gynocriticism certainly drew attention to the history of the way literary critics had handled the work of women.  These days, structural analysis at the textual level is routine but in the 1970s it was illuminating to see tracked the way the critiques by men of the work of George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans, 1819–1880) shifted after the revelation of her identity.  At a time when literary theory was being consumed by postmodernism, not all were happy about the author being “fetishized” because it seemed archaic in the age of “text” and there was of course the objection what Showalter had done was create a “female canon”, an inherently exclusionary project that ignored those not of the white middle-class.  Still, gynocriticism was after all a framework and was there for lesbians, persons of color or others to construct their own canons and whether such “sub-siloing” was a help or hindrance to the cause of feminism really wasn’t relevant; the point being it was inevitable.  Although in the twenty-first century the term gynocriticism rarely is heard, that is an indication of its success because it's part of the fabric of feminist critical theory (on the model of the way the IT industry stopped talking about OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) after it became (for a while) an orthodoxy).  Like structural-functionalism, even though gynocriticism became unfashionable, its core assumptions and methods continue to underpin the field.

Feminism's Waves

Fourth wave feminist: Lindsay Lohan,  image from a photoshoot by Terry Richardson (b 1965) for Love magazine, 2012.

The notion of feminism being not a fixed manifesto but a process in incremental waves is from a 1968 piece in the New York Times Magazine by journalist Martha Lear (b 1932).  The context was to note the appearance a decade earlier of second-wave feminism, focusing now on unofficial inequalities, unlike the first wave which was essentially structuralist.  While lineal, there’s overlap between the waves and, in both popular culture and academia, some resistance to change.  Whatever its other implications, feminism needs to be considered a political construct and it operates, as does politics, through cross-cutting cleavages; in the same way the formation of the G8 (the Group of 8, an assembly of advanced industrial economies created when Russia was added to the G7) didn’t mean the G7 ceased to exist, the successive waves in feminism both absorbed and operated in parallel with earlier waves.

First-wave feminism (1895-1950s): In this “de jure” period, the focus was on legal issues such as women's suffrage, property rights and political candidacy.

Second-wave feminism (1960s-1980s): Even before equality in legal rights wholly was achieved, the movement broadened the debate to include sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights and other de facto inequalities. Attention to first-wave issues focused on child custody and divorce law.  In the West, it was the parameters of 2WF that established the popular perception of "feminism".  

Third-wave feminism (1990-2000s): Although there were cultural links, the intellectual origins of 3WF lie in a 1992 article by feminist Rebecca Walker (b 1969) and although never exactly defined, it was said to emphasize an interest in individualism and diversity (which hadn't yet become DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)).  Controversial even at the time, with strains of libertarianism now competing with the historic collectivist model, it sought to change the parameters of feminism and there were those who argued that with men effectively having surrendered, the opposition to the notion of 3WF came mostly from those feminists who had built sometimes lucrative careers on the framework of 2WF.  It was with the emergence of 3WF that feminism truly can be said to have become schismatic with 2WF an orthodoxy (and something of an ancien régime).    

Fourth-wave feminism (circa 2010-): Regarded as a least partially technologically deterministic, 4WF is thought to have emerged circa 2008-2012 as social media gained critical mass.  It focuses on intersectionality and examines the interconnected systems of power that maintain the marginalized of certain groups in society.  4WF advocates for greater representation of these groups in all places within the power-elite, arguing equality for women will become possible only if policies and practices incorporate all groups.  There were those who argued 4WF was really 3WF 1.1 while others suggested the need for a 5WF but no coherent work has yet been published.

Mountweazel

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) that 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.

Combustibles magazine (special issue, 4 June, 1973).

Ms Mountweazel may never have lived but in death is memorialized in the Lillian Virginia Mountweazel Research Collection that 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, dubbed in the West "Concordski") 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 (1939)), a short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986).

Of course the irony in Mr Alford revealing the true history of Lillian Virginia Mountweazel was he made “her” Ms Tweedy-Holmes’ most famous entry yet that very notoriety rendered Ms Mountweazel useless in the intended function of copyright trap.  The biographical data certainly had been crafted with care to make it resemble in form and type those of thousands of other worthy but minor footnotes from history.  “Fountain designer turned photographer” was the sort of diverse career path forged by many and although, given the “constructed” circumstances, a birthplace in “Bangs, Ohio” might seem a bit of a hint, that’s only in retrospect and to readers at the time it would have been unremarkable; for Ms Tweedy-Holmes, the “in-joke” must have been irresistible.  The title “Flags Up” was exactly what a magazine sub-editor would have chosen for a photographic essay on the “mailboxes of rural America”, that a reference to the pivoting metal fitting (in the shape of a flag flying in the wind atop a flagpole) attached to mailboxes in rural areas, residents “raising the flag” to alert the mail delivery driver (then called mailmen, despite some being women) there was something in the box to be collected for delivery.  That technique (a mix of facts, plausible untruths & half-truths) is what makes the detection of “fake news”, “misinformation” and “disinformation” a challenge, increasingly so since generative AI (artificial intelligence) has placed at the finger-tips of all the ability to create proto-realistic images and life-like video content, something once the preserve of a relative handful.

Official Journal of the Institute of Explosives Engineers, March 2026 edition.  It would seem women involved in “blowing-up stuff” prefer to wear sensible shoes.  That seems wise.

While there was no “Combustibles” magazine (for the entrepreneurial it seems a gap in the market), 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 16^th, Take That (an English pop group formed in Manchester in 1990) will be performing their Circus Live show at the city’s Principality Stadium.

Graphic example of combustibility (timber buildings incinerated, structures of concrete or stone still standing): USASC (US Army Signal Corps) aerial reconnaissance photograph of Tokyo after "fire-bombing" by USAAF (US Army Air Force) Boeing B-29s, March 1945.

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 where 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 of excerpts 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 (able to reveal something about the copying (such as a date stamp)) can be edited so what sometimes was done was the insertion of something hidden, able to be detected only at the software level and not visually.  The best known was the “Alt + 255 trick”, a keyboard combination creating a 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 and that's 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”; that 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 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-); it 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.  A confessed Freemason, 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 appear in some work of reference and be presented as “genuine”, enduring in that form long enough to take on some sort of life.  Humorists and experimentalists have of course coined or repurposed words that 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 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 at the time much-mocked, normalcy certainly had 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 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” and in 1920 many assumed Mr Harding had “misspoken”.  For someone to “misspeak” was then understood to mean “saying something incorrectly, unclearly or inaccurately (by mistake).  The word “Misspeak” thus distinguished unintentional errors, mispronunciations or “slips of the tongue” from deliberate lies but it came to suffer 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 (something with 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 that tends either to be annoying or amusing but which, in certain cases, 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 that 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 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 (that 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 that 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 that year out of the 2,030 produced during a six-year run (1956-1961)).

The Trivia Encyclopedia (1974): Mostly accurate.

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 Q&A (questions & answers) from his books.  There were many instances of copying he cited but his key piece of evidence was a mountweazel he'd included: the “trivial fact” the first name of the TV detective Lieutenant Columbo was: “Philip”.  This was a product of Mr Worth’s imagination but in the board game, it appeared 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.

Not to be confused: Mr Spock (left) & Dr Spock (right).

The Trivia Encyclopedia mostly was accurate although there appeared on the cover an “accidental” mountweasel.  The “Dr Spock” mentioned in the cover art was the character in the TV Series Star Trek (1966-1969) who was always referred to as “Mr Spock” (reflecting the practice in the USN (US Navy), the rank-structure and conventions of which were adopted for the series).  Within The Trivia Encyclopedia, things are OK, the character always referred to as “Mr Spock” and the “trivial facts” correct:  (1) Mr Spock was Science Officer on the Starship Enterprise; (2) he was played by Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015); (3) his human mother was Amanda (played by Jane Wyatt (1910-2006)); (4) his Vulcan father was Sarek (played by Mark Lenard (1924-1996)).  In publishing, by convention, authors tend not to have the final say on a book’s title or cover art so it was likely an editor at Brooke House who may inadvertently have put the mountweazel on the cover.  Presumably the confusion arose because (1) Mr Spock (despite his famous and much admired "neck-pinch" immobilizing technique) was rather nerdy in the stereotypical way of a physics Ph.D, and (2) while the series was being televised, the book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by US paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock (1903–1998) had become a best-seller, making its author a household name.  Spock being an unusual name, “Dr” became so associated with “Spock”, many not familiar with the intricate details of the TV series may have conflated the two.

On just about any topic, there's probably a trivia list somewhere on-line.

Defending the suit, 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 judges acknowledged the logic but found it too much of a stretch to be accommodated within copyright law and did not concur.  Amusingly however, others also copied Mr Worth’s mountweazel with references to “Lieutenant Philip Columbo” over the years appearing 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. revealing his name was “Frank Columbo”.