Mountweazel

English Alternative forms en mountweazel Etymology Coined 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.Henry Alford Not a Word w:The New Yorker 2005-08-21 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/08/29/not-a-word 0028-792X The investigator first removed from contention any word that was easily recognized or that appears in Webster’s Third New International;the remaining three hundred and sixty words were then vetted with a battery of references. Six potential Mountweazels emerged. https://web.archive.org/web/20170309051436/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/08/29/not-a-wordMountweazel, Lilian Virginia William H. Harris; Judith S. Levey The New Columbia Encyclopedia 1975 Columbia University Press New York 1850 https://archive.org/details/newcolumbiaencyc00harr/page/1850/mode/1up 978-0-231-03572-9 Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine. Noun A nihilartikel. en Henry Alford Not a Word w:The New Yorker 2005-08-21 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/08/29/not-a-word 0028-792X The investigator first removed from contention any word that was easily recognized or that appears in Webster’s Third New International;the remaining three hundred and sixty words were then vetted with a battery of references. Six potential Mountweazels emerged. https://web.archive.org/web/20170309051436/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/08/29/not-a-word en-US Nick Norlen ‘Glitch of the Pentagon’: There’s a reason you might not have heard of this monster w:The Washington Post 2018-12-31 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/glitch-of-the-pentagon-theres-a-reason-you-might-not-have-heard-of-this-monster/2018/12/21/6fc430ae-e9f0-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html 0190-8286 Tweedy-Holmes is now a professional photographer, and portions of her website bio read a bit like a mountweazel: “Her images of the male nude were exhibited extensively to critical acclaim in the 1970s and are among the first art photographs of this subject by an American woman.”Before we got to the big questions, I asked if she knew what fake encyclopedia entries are sometimes called now, and she said she didn’t. “They’re called mountweazels,” I said. https://web.archive.org/web/20181231143541/https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/glitch-of-the-pentagon-theres-a-reason-you-might-not-have-heard-of-this-monster/2018/12/21/6fc430ae-e9f0-11e8-a939-9469f1166f9d_story.html en 2020 w:Eley Williams The Liar's Dictionary Anchor 9780385546782 https://books.google.com/books?id=jcXdDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT76&dq=%22Mountweazels%22&hl=&cd=2&source=gbs_api#v=onepage&q=%22Mountweazels%22&f=false “I need to talk to you about mountweazels.”“Mountweazels,” I repeated.“There are mistakes. In the dictionary,” David said. There seemed to be a sob edging the softness of his voice. I stared at him. He assumed a defensive tone. “Well. Not mistakes. Not-quite mistakes. They're words that are meant to be there but not meant to be there.” en 2021 Rochelle Lieber Introducing Morphology Cambridge University Press 9781108832489 32 third https://books.google.com/books?id=X_w7EAAAQBAJ&pg=PA32&dq=%22Mountweazels%22&hl=&cd=4&source=gbs_api#v=onepage&q=%22Mountweazels%22&f=false Lest you think that lexicographers are humorless (“harmless drudges” as Johnson calls them in his dictionary), let's consider the issues of mountweazels mentioned briefly above. As Henry Alford reveals in the August 29, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary (2001) planted the non-existent word esquivalience among the entries for the letter “e” to catch potential dictionary pirates. Hypernyms en copyright trap References en autological terms eponyms