Re: OT: interestin' factoids (mostly language-related)
| From: | J Matthew Pearson <pearson@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, August 4, 2000, 23:02 |
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Jonathan Chang wrote:
> In a message dated 2000/08/04 04:35:28 AM, Spacey you wrote:
>
> >There's a whole gamut of stuff wrong in those factoids, most notably the
> >omission of the word "strengths".
>
> It was fwd'd to me... I figured it would be amusin' to say the least...
> I shoulda put quotations around "factoids."
No need for the scare quotes. A factoid is not the same thing as a fact. In
my parlance, a "factoid" is a brief (usually useless) snippet of information
which sounds like a fact, but is usually either wrong or unverifiable.
Factoids thrive because they have that so-weird-it's-gotta-be-true appeal,
packed into a small, easy to remember soundbite. They're the haiku of urban
legends.
The number of language-related factoids out there is truly staggering, and as
an educator I find myself doing battle with them all the time. Probably the
most persistent is "Eskimos have 40 (or 400, or 4000) words for snow". This
is doubly annoying because (a) it is false, and (b) even if it were true, it
wouldn't really be such an amazing feat.
Matt.