Quick FYI - factoid: a false fact that is repeated often enough to become accepted as true.
According to Wikipedia [1]:
> The term was coined originally in 1973 as a neologism by American writer Norman Mailer to mean a "piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it’s not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print." Since its creation in 1973 the term has evolved from its original meaning, in common usage, and has assumed other meanings, particularly being used to describe a brief or trivial item of news or information. So it is a factoid that "factoid" means something that is true.
It's not literally as bad as the figuritive misuse of literally, where literally has come to mean figuratively and literally... This one I fight all day long.
But the "-oid" suffix doesn't mean "small", it means "like or resembling". So "factoid" being something that is not, but superficially resembles, a fact makes sense. A "factoid" being a "brief fact" does not.
"Factlet" would be a sensible word for a brief fact.
Ironically, maybe this was the intention of the way this word was derived. It seems like it should mean a brief/small fact, but in fact it means an untrue fact, therefore serving as a perfectly recursive example of itself.
"Factoid" does mean what it sounds like (that is, it is a simple application of the common suffix "-oid" to the root "fact", both in their usual senses.)
The use CNN latched on to is not what it sounds like.
This is a little clever: it's true by whichever definition you choose, and the preceding text does not clearly prefer one or the other.
Like http://bash.org/?10958 -- it's funny when you know C, but it's funnier when you also know UNIX.