I want to thank the folks at ThoughtCo for answering this question.

“A Mountweazel is a bogus entry deliberately inserted in a reference work, usually as a safeguard against copyright infringement. The source of the term is the fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a bogus entry in the fourth edition of The New Columbia Encyclopedia.”

Even more fun is the description of her death. Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.

So if someone copied “all the facts” from the encyclopedia and made their own book, this little lie would be proof they had copied it from someone else.

This got me thinking about the English language and how it changes over time. It is very much a living language.  Some linguistic changes have been hard to go along with, while others had an “it’s about time” feel.

Here are some examples I found that entered the Oxford Dictionary for 2020.

Sharent is a parent who frequently uses social media to share photos or other details about their child.

Amirite is used to elicit agreement or solidarity at the end of an observation or used facetiously to undermine or mock the preceding observation as in “Am I Right!”

GOAT is the acronym standing for “greatest of all time.” As in, the new phone is the GOAT.

Now you can sleep easy tonight with this new knowledge.

I thought about what made-up words I’d like to see added or not.

Covidiot has been around for a bit now. At first, I thought it was brilliant and reflected my feeling towards those who believed covid-19 was a hoax. As time marched on, I realized that negatively labelling others would not encourage change or raise the discussion’s quality. A book I read titled Don’t Label Me, by Irshad Manji, helped nudge me towards being more engaged to understand the other person’s point of view. How did they come to their thinking? What influenced them to have their beliefs?

Within this is a hope that after telling me, they will reciprocate and ask me. If not, I have lost very little and gained a lot. I might be so bold as to ask if the person would be interested to know how I came to my beliefs. If not, I can move on.

So, please give this a bit of a think. What is one word you made up that works for you? Please let me know in a comment.

My thanks to https://www.thoughtco.com/

Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde on Unsplash

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