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

[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.)