Beware the mountweazel
As the comedian Victor Borge once said, “I normally don’t do requests. Unless, of course, I have been asked to do so.” My friend Michael requested “mountweazel” as the Word of the Day. With a word like “mountweazel,” how can I refuse?
A mountweazel is a fake entry deliberately placed into a reference work, like an encyclopedia or a dictionary. It’s a trap, to prevent (or at least discover) potential copyright infringement. That is, if someone cribs whole sections of your encyclopedia and reprints them, and you find your mountweazel in there….bang, you’ve caught them red-handed and probably red-faced, too! Let the lawsuits begin!
The word originated as a bogus entry in the fourth edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia in 1975. The entry began: “Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia (1942-1973).” It went on to say that the fictitious Ms. Mountweazel was an American photographer, born in Bangs, Ohio, who turned from designing fountains to taking photos in 1963. She died at the tender age of 31 when, while on assignment for “Combustibles” magazine, there was an explosion. Poor Lillian. It’s enough to make you want to shed crocodile tears.
Sometimes, phony words turn up in dictionaries not as mountweazels, but as “ghost words,” because someone made a mistake and a proofreader or copyeditor simply missed it.
Mapmakers have their own version of moutnweazels to prevent copyright infringement. They call them “trap streets,” which is not as cool as “mountweazel,” but serves the same purpose. In the 1930’s, the mapmaking firm General Drafting Corp. added a whole fake hamlet called “Agloe, New York” (in the Catskills) to one of their road maps. In the 1950’s, some clever souls built the “Agloe General Store” at the intersection shown on the map, and it became a landmark. The Agloe General Store eventually shut down, but if you search for it on Google maps, it’s still there! (As Casey Stengel said, “You could look it up.”)
I’m pretty sure that a few years ago, my GPS accidentally deposited me in a field far from my intended destination because it was reading a trap street. Or else it just had a grudge against me. We’ll never know for sure.
