Esquivalience
Esquivalience, according to the August 29, 2005 New Yorker article,
"Ink: Not a Word" by Henry Alford , is a fake entry in the New Oxford
American Dictionary designed and included to protect copyright of the
publication. It was leaked that the dictionary had put in a fake word
in the "e" section and a private investigator set out to find the word.
It was discovered after review of a short list by several experts. When
the editor, Erin McKean, was contacted she admitted that it was indeed
a fake word and had been in since the first edition, in order to
protect the copyright of the cdrom edition.
The word is defined to mean: "the willful avoidance of one's official
responsibilities."
[edit]
Other Cases
Deliberately false articles included in encyclopedias, whether intended
as copyright traps or for humorous effect, are called Nihilartikels,
from a German word. The practice dates back at least to the 1880s.
The New Yorker article points out that this type of practice is not
unheard of with both dictionaries and encyclopedias. For example; in
the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia there is an entry for
Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, who is described as a former fountain
designer and photographer, tragically killed in an explosion while on a
photo shoot for the magazine "Combustables".
Richard Steins, an editor of the volume was quoted, saying: "It was an
old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your
copyright. If someone copied Lillian, then we'd know they stolen from
us."
INK
NOT A WORD
Issue of 2005-08-29
Posted 2005-08-22
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050829ta_talk_alford
Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia
and you’ll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain
designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of
photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel,
the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to
die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles
magazine.”
If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or
mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was
an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect
your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors,
said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d
stolen from us.”
So when word leaked out that the recently published second edition of
the New Oxford American Dictionary contains a made-up word that starts
with the letter “e,” an independent investigator set himself the task
of sifting through NOAD’s thirty-one hundred and twenty-eight “e”
entries in search of the phony. 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. They were:
earth loop—n. Electrical British term for GROUND LOOP.
EGD—n. a technology or system that integrates a computer display with a
pair of eyeglasses . . . abbreviation of eyeglass display.
electrofish—v. [trans.] fish (a stretch of water) using electrocution
or a weak electric field.
ELSS—abbr. extravehicular life support system.
esquivalience—n. the willful avoidance of one’s official
responsibilities . . . late 19th cent.: perhaps from French esquiver,
“dodge, slink away.”
eurocreep—n. informal the gradual acceptance of the euro in European
Union countries that have not yet officially adopted it as their
national currency.
The six words and their definitions were e-mailed to nine
lexicographical authorities. Anne Soukhanov, the U.S. General Editor of
Encarta Webster’s, was the first to weigh in. “Ess-kwa-val-ee-ohnce—I
want to pronounce it in the French manner—is your culprit,” she said.
Six other experts also fingered “esquivalience,” citing various
rationales. “It’s just trying a little too hard,” said Wendalyn
Nichols, the editor-in-chief of the newsletter “Copy Editor” and a
onetime editorial director of Random House Reference. “If it’s derived
from esquiver, it wouldn’t have that ending. Nothing linguistically
would give rise to the ‘l.’ ” The Times’ crossword-puzzle editor, Will
Shortz, explained, “I simply can’t believe such a thing goes back to
the nineteenth century.” Steve Kleinedler, a senior editor of the
American Heritage Dictionary, said, “The stress pattern is strange.”
The most personal of the rationales belonged to Eli Horowitz, an editor
of the literary anthology “The Future Dictionary of America,” who
complained, “I had to read it a few times, and I resent that.”
There were two dissenters among the experts. “ ‘Esquivalience’ is too
elaborate,” said Sidney Landau, the author of “Dictionaries: The Art
and Craft of Lexicography” and the editor of the Cambridge Dictionary
of American English. “If someone made that up, they’re nuts.” Landau
chose “ELSS,” he said, “for the simple reason that it’s short. A
dictionary wouldn’t want to waste more than a line or two.” Meanwhile,
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.”
A call was placed to Erin McKean, the editor-in-chief of the second
edition of NOAD. Upon being presented with the majority opinion, McKean
confirmed that “esquivalience” was a fabricated word. She said that
Oxford had included it in NOAD’s first edition, in 2001, to protect the
copyright of the electronic version of the text that accompanied most
copies of the book. “The editors figured, We’re all working really
hard, so let’s put in a word that means ‘working really hard.’ Nothing
materialized, so they thought, Let’s do the opposite.” An editor named
Christine Lindberg came up with “esquivalience.” The word has since
been spotted on Dictionary.com, which cites Webster’s New Millennium as
its source. “It’s interesting for us that we can see their
methodology,” McKean said. “Or lack thereof. It’s like tagging and
releasing giant turtles.”
As for “esquivalience” ’s excesses, McKean made no apologies. “Its
inherent fakeitude is fairly obvious,” she said. “We wanted something
highly improbable. We were trying to make a word that could not arise
in nature.” Indeed, “esquivalience,” like Lillian Virginia Mountweazel,
is something of a maverick. “There shouldn’t be an ‘l’ in there. It
should be esquivarience,” McKean conceded. “But that sounds like it
would mean ‘slight differences between racehorses.’ ”
— Henry Alford
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