mountweazel

[prettygoodword]

mountweazel or Mountweazel (MOUNT-wee-zuhl) - n., a deliberately fictitious entry in a reference work, included to brand the intellectual property so copies can be identified.


A form of copyright trap specific to dictionaries and encyclopedias. Coinded by Henry Alford in the The New Yorker from an entry for a fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia, which claimed she was a fountain designer turned photographer, who died in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.

I'll pause there to let you finish laughing.

Okay, good? Good. Another, more recent synonym is nihilartikel, coined in the exact same process from a 2003 hoax article of the same name in the German-language Wikipedia.

---L.

Comments

[dhampyresa]

Shame Lillian isn't real, her life sounds fascinating.

[prettygoodword]

I know, right?

[full_metal_ox]

And let’s not forget maps, which will sometimes feature fictitious streets or small towns as copyright stamps; I wonder what effect the practice has had on subsequent GPS, and if Siri or Alexa ever direct users to imaginary places.

I can also attest to the existence of at least one such deliberate error in an early version of Trivial Pursuit, because I’ve gotten into more than one argument on this point without reference material readily available: I’m pretty confident that no iteration of Wonder Woman has ever had yellow stars on her costume bottoms.

[prettygoodword]

I should have mentioned maps, because yeah, totally a cartographic thing as well.

[full_metal_ox]

The cartographic term is “paper towns”, and there’s a famous incident wherein a trolling University of Michigan fan sneaked a couple fictitious northern Ohio towns into the 1978-79 official state map of Michigan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatosu_and_Goblu

[prettygoodword]

Heh.

(I've got cousins living near Beatosu.)