Not a Word: The story of Lillian Virginia Mountweazel

Of course, once you invent a word... it's a word. In this, words are unlike Ms. Mountweazel, who does not spring into existence in the timestream just because an article is published about her.

Or... does she?

This calls for an obligatory Jorge Luis Borges reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlön,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius

Though I can never cite that story without confessing that I prefer the four-paragraph condensed version by John M. Ford [warning: literary prerequisites suggested; tolerance for awful puns absolutely required]:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004636.html

This, of course, is a form of digital watermarking in for textual data. Due to unique problems, natural language watermarking and steganography is not advanced or is covered as much as image, video, and audio watermarking. For one thing, it is impossible to make changes to text that are udetectable by consumers, as in images; all changes introduce meaning shifts.

If you want to dig deeper, here's one of the rare introductory papers on the subject: https://www.cerias.purdue.edu/tools_and_resources/bibtex_arc....

"Garret Thomson, a self-described 'code monkey,' or programmer, for Pseudodictionary.com, a site that calls itself 'the dictionary for words that wouldn’t make it into the dictionaries,' picked 'electrofish,' calling it 'clunky-sounding.'"

Were they not allowed to use Google?

I used to work for a company that produces a well known encyclopedia as well dictionaries and thesauri and other reference works and I can tell you this practice makes for a lot of fun. These sort of textual watermarks make it easy to track who's copying whom across relevant sites.

You can play the same game with false information, whether inserted accidentally or by design.

The interesting bit is that made up dictionary terms can actually become perfectly cromulent if enough people fall for the gag.

When this happens on a map, it's called a "trap street" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

In search of Mountweazels, which are something "like tagging and releasing giant turtles."

it seems that this was published originally in 2005 - http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...