[found via Daring Fireball via kottke.org]
The New Yorker has a short piece on fake entries in encyclopedias and dictionaries that serve as traps for would-be plagiarists. The initial example is the entry for “Lillian Virginia Mountweazel” in the New Columbia Encyclopedia, a non-existent “fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!’”.
Then the investigation turns to the New Oxford American Dictionary, which turns out to have the following fake entry:
esquivalience —- *n. the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities … late 19th cent.: perhaps from French esquiver, “dodge, slink away.”
John Gruber at Daring Fireball adds: “The New Oxford American Dictionary, of course, is the dictionary behind Mac OS X 10.4’s new Dictionary application, and, indeed, there’s an entry for esquivalience, complete with usage examples and fake etymology. (Go ahead and look it up with a Command-Control-D.)” So, I did. Here’s the entry in all its beauty:
I think this is not fair at all, because we, dictionary users, are mislead to use words that do not exist. TV, Cinema and other mass media have already produced a great amount of misinformation. For instance, it is due to many awful comic movies, which depict Brazil as a Spanish speaking Country, that many people in the US and Europe think Spanish is the language of Brazil. I could also mention lots of misconceptions about Germany and Germans that the mass media spread. One manner to solve the problem consists of checking the (mis-)information with reliable sources. So far, encyclopaedias and dictionaries have been used to settle such matters. If they include fake entries they cause harm not only to plagiarist but the whole public.
August 30th, 2005, at 10:25 am #Of course, if enough people mistakenly use the fake word, then it becomes a genuine usage, and so therefore SHOULD be included in the dictionary.
August 30th, 2005, at 1:36 pm #