FT248

In FT243:73, reader Rosemary Regan asked about fictitious entries in reference works… Or did she?

The solid printed reference book is the ultimate authority for most of us; while we may not believe everything just because it’s there in black and white, it is the gold standard for reliability. Unfortunately, even the most respectable textbooks contain deliberate untruths.

Sometimes the inaccuracies show a spirit of playfulness. Compiling reference works is a tedious business, and there is the temptation to slip in some humour. This dates back at least to 1775, when Dr Johnson allowed himself a few jokey definitions in his celebrated dictionary:
“Monsieur: a term of reproach for a Frenchman”
And, famously –
“Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words.”

The tradition is carried on by works such as Chambers, whose 2006 dictionary includes entries such as “Mullet: a hairstyle that is short at the front, long at the back, and ridiculous all round.” Sometimes compilers add entire joke entries, like the ‘steinlaus’ or stone louse, an imaginary rock-eating creature in the German medical dictionary Pschyrembel Klinisches Wörterbuch. The entry was removed after the 1996 edition, but returned in extended form after a campaign by readers.

These fictitious entries are sometimes created as copyright traps to detect plagiarism. For example, The New Oxford American Dictionary, in August 2005, contains the word ‘esquivalience’, defined as “the wilful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities”. Since the word did not exist previously, any other dictionary containing esquivali­ence must have been illegally copied from the New Oxford. However, publicity around the discovery of the fake word means that esquivalience has been picked up and used as a real word – which presumably means that it can now legitimately be included in other dictionaries.

Such fictiti­ous entries are sometimes called Mountweazels, after Lillian Virg­inia Mountweazel, who was invented as a copyright trap in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia. The entry describes her as a fountain designer and photo­grapher who had published a collection of pictures of American mailboxes. They are also called Nihilartikels, a German term literally meaning ‘nothing article’. However Nihilartikel itself appears to be a made-up word originating in the German version of Wikipedia – but this may only make it more appropriate.

Copyright traps are commonly added to maps, which are perhaps more likely to be plagiarised than reference books. In Mythconceptions [FT147:28], Mat Coward repeated the Ordnance Survey’s claim that they never introduce imagin­ary elements in their maps. This may be true, but it makes them unusual.

The A–Z Map Company, publishers of the popular guide to London’s streets, has a particular technique that avoids misleading map users. Where a new street is being constructed which has not been named, the A–Z map will include a made-up name as a copyright trap. One such trap street was ‘Bartlett Place’ which has now been given its permanent name ‘Broadway Walk’. They also introduce the occasional new street, such as Lye Close in Bristol. [1] The company says that such streets are usually cul-de-sacs put in out-of-the-way places that would be unlikely to confuse anyone.

Cartographical copyright traps may leak over into reality. Maps made in the 1930s by the General Drafting Company included the fictitious settlement of Agloe at a road intersection in the Catskills in New York State. This was invented by mapmakers Otto G Lindberg and his assistant, Ernest Alpers, by combining their initials. A shop called Agloe General Store was then built on the intersection. The owner had been given the name by the county administration because – of course – it appeared on their maps. The State of Idaho may have taken its name from a nonexistent place, but this is disputed. [2]

Some fictitious entries might be there for less noble reasons. Viscount Falkland recalls that in his days as an editorial assistant on a Writers’ Who’s Who, there was conflict between the manager and a senior editor. The editor took his revenge by crafting subtle fictitious entries, such as a travel writer supposed to have written works such as 1936: Across Ethiopia with Pan and Pen. [3]

Elsewhere one suspects that compilers who are paid for each entry might be taking advantage of the obscurity of their field. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography contains no fewer than 14 fictitious botanists. [4] Possibly the botany contributor counted (successfully) on editors not checking his work.

More seriously for forteans, the defin­itive online reference for urban legends, Snopes.com, includes some fictitious entries. A section of their site called the Repository of Lost Legends (or TroLL) includes several tales that are described as being true. These include such unlikely stories as the Titanic showing an early silent version of The Poseidon Adventure when it hit an iceberg, and that the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song Of Sixpence” was a coded signal by pirate crews to attract new recruits in taverns.

Both of these have been picked up by compilers of trivia and retailed as amazing ‘facts’. But as is explained elsewhere on the Snopes website, [5]  TroLL was created as an example of the risk of “False Authority Syndrome” which is the result of readers “taking as gospel any one information outlet’s unsupported word”.
A reference work seeking to undermine the authority of reference works is highly subversive – and very fortean.

But don’t take my word for it…

Notes
1  http://tinyurl.com/9wjhgj (Guardian)
2  http://tinyurl.com/85ohj7 (alphadictionary.com)
3  http://tinyurl.com/93j4xd (Lords’ Hansard)
4  www.jstor.org/pss/1839450
5  www.snopes.com/lost/false.asp
For more on map mistakes, see FT153:55.