mountweazel

If you watched this week’s Inside No. 9 on the BBC (and if you didn’t, go and do that immediately), you will have heard this term, along with its definition. A mountweazel is a bit of fake information deliberately added to a reference work like a map or dictionary to root out anyone who’s illegally copying them. I used to work in directory publishing (which is as boring as it sounds), and we included made-up companies based at our home addresses to make sure people weren’t stealing data from our directories. So if I got a bit of marketing bumpf delivered at home from a company we knew hadn’t bought a list of addresses from us, then we knew they’d just copied it from the publication.

Here are some more fun examples.

Photo by REVOLT on Unsplash.

• The New Oxford American Dictionary added the made-up word ‘esquivalience’ in 2005 which they defined as ‘the wilful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities’ (geddit?).

• The fictional town of Agloe in New York was added to maps as a ‘trap street’ to catch any would-be copyright infringers. Agloe ended up becoming a real landmark for a brief time after a shop opened on the spot named ‘Agloe General Store’, after the name on the maps. Unfortunately it later went bust and Agloe is no more. (Trap streets are quite common in cartography – so much so that they were a major plot point in an episode of Doctor Who called ‘Face the Raven’. It featured a hidden street where aliens could seek asylum, which people dismissed as a trap street when they saw it on maps.)

So, why are these called ‘mountweazels’? Well, it’s after one Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fake entry added to the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. It read as follows:

‘Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942–1973, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972). Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.’

Mountweazels are also known as ‘nihilartikels’ which means ‘nothing article’ in Latin and German.

Sometimes words get added to reference works by accident (or crappy proofreading), in which case they’re called ‘ghost words’. The most famous example of a ghost word is ‘dord’ which appeared in the 1934 second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, and was defined as meaning ‘density’. This was in fact a proofreading error (the original entry said ‘D or d, cont/ density’ and was referring to the abbreviation ‘d’). It took five years for an eagle-eyed editor to spot it, and another eight years before it was removed from the dictionary.

sycophant

Photo by Deidre Schlabs on Unsplash.

You know what a sycophant is – someone who sucks up to someone else to get an advantage. Also known as a toady, creep, lickspittle and so on. But it hasn’t always meant that. Previously, a sychophant was someone who accused someone else of being a fig-smuggler. Nope, this isn’t another name for Speedos – it dates all the way back to classical Athens (which was a long time ago y’all).

So, way back in the sixth century (I said it was a long time ago), Athens law didn’t let anyone export food (apart from olives, because that would just be mean) outside its borders. Apparently this was torture for some fig-loving souls, who broke the law by smuggling the fruit* out. Unlike food transportation, blackmail wasn’t against the law (that’s some effed-up legal system right there). So if someone busted you leaving town with your pockets full of figs, they’d threaten to tell the fuzz about it. These blackmailers were called sykophantes, which translates as ‘revealer of figs’.

(At this point I should probably say that Wikipedia reckons this is a load of old cobblers, as there’s no concrete proof for the whole thing. But ‘sykophantes’ does mean ‘revealer of figs’, and Plutarch (Greek scholar and all round clever dude) said it was true, so let’s just go with it. Because the other explanations are nowhere near as interesting.)

I’ve just realised I’ve never had a fig.

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*Interesting fact alert: A fig isn’t technically a fruit – it’s an ‘inverted flower’. And they only exist because of the fig wasp. (Warning: this is gross, sorry. Brace yourself.)

Female wasps clamber inside figs to lay their eggs. It’s a one-way trip – getting in rips their wings off (I told you it was gross). Once the eggs are laid, the wasp dies. The baby wasps grow up inside the fig then mate (wait, aren’t they all related? Ewww). Then the boys die (they’re born without any wings, so their only job is to get their rocks off with their sisters), and the females fly out of the fig, all covered in pollen, off to find a male fig of their own to do the whole thing again. But, PLOT TWIST: figs have genders, and only the male ones have the special egg area (not what it’s called) the wasps need to lay in. So as long as Mrs Wasp sets up shop in a male fig, everything’s fine (apart from the whole wing-ripping, dying part). But if she ends up in a female fig, she’s a bit screwed. So, she just dies, with no babies. But the good news is, she does pollinate the fig with the pollen she bought with her. Which means more figs, I think (I’m not a scientist, okay?).

Us humans only eat female figs (I’m not sure how you tell the difference – maybe they get paid less than their male counterparts), which contain an enzyme that digests the bits of dead wasp. But because of the absolute horror show mentioned above, a lot of vegans don’t eat them at all. And I don’t think I’ll be trying one any time soon.

tanka

A tanka is a Japanese lyric poem (stay with me). It’s like a haiku, which you probably had to learn about at school, but a bit longer – 31 syllables rather than 17. Tankas are made up of five unrhymed lines of five, seven, five, seven and seven syllables. They’re often romantic poems, and they talk about the weather a lot as well (so us Brits should LOVE them). They generally follow a set structure – the first three lines are usually about a particular image or thought, then the last two move the focus to something else (but still related to the original idea). Confused? Me too. Here’s an example of a tanka by Stella Pierides, a British writer and poet which hopefully shows what I mean.

this sultry evening
I mistake your eyes for two
hovering fireflies
such stillness only the dead
and the truly happy know

Nice, right?

The word ‘tanka’ was used in the second half of the eighth century in Japan to describe short poems, as opposed to chōka for (you’ve guessed it) long poems. As time went on, and probably due to a general lack of attention span, short poems became more popular. These were given the general name of ‘waka’, and the word ‘tanka’ fell out of favour for a bit (thank god they didn’t decide to combine the two names…). Then, in the early 20th century, a Japanese poet and critic by the name of Masaoka Shiki decided that waku needed updating for the times, and revived the word ‘tanka’. He also made the word ‘haiku’ popular as well (these were previously called hokkus) for the same reason. I’m not sure where he got all this renaming power from, but well done him.

Seventh-century nobles in the Japanese Imperial court held tanka poetry competitions. I like to think of these as ye olde rap battles.

licit

I came across this word in the book I’m reading at the moment (A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine in case you’re interested). You can probably guess that it’s the opposite of ‘illicit’, a word I’d always assumed is unpaired (i.e. one that looks like it should have an opposite, but doesn’t – I wrote a blog post on this a while back, which you can read here). Because that’s the kind of thing I think about. What a loser.

I don’t know what this picture has to do with anything, but it was the only one that came up when I put ‘illicit’ into the Unsplash image search (there was nothing at all for ‘licit’). So I stuck it here anyway. Oh, and it’s by timJ.

Licit means ‘lawful’ and comes from the Latin word licitus, meaning ‘lawful, permitted, allowed’ which is where we also get ‘licence’ from. Its first use in print was in 1483, and then someone stuck an ‘il’ on it to make its opposite number around 19 years later (‘il’ as a prefix often appears at the start of words beginning with ‘l’ to change the meaning – think logical/illogical, literate/illiterate, legal/illegal, and so on). For some reason – maybe because us humans much prefer doing/writing about bad behaviour over the good stuff…? – illicit went on to be used much more regularly while licit fell by the linguistic wayside. I also found a source that said that in the 19th century licit was ‘condemned unjustly as an Americanism’, which might be another reason we stopped using it (because it seems we’re xenophobic as well as naughty).

Read the other words of the week.