mountweazel

Done rt!

Thanks for the confirmation, bilby. You'd think they could come up with a better way to avoid plagiarism than sending us all down the wrong path.

Dontcry, you must add that phrase to your Wordie vocabulary immediately! :-)

Our Tom Tom must have been using one of those mountweazels when it dragged us through the woods for miles on an unpaved road in the Laurel Mountains last weekend. I'll refer to those harrowing hours forevermore as Mountweazel's Revenge.

rt, we commissioned a designer to do street maps for a guide book I co-wrote. Yep, false streets were in. In one case she put a curve in a street that wasn't there in real life.

article about dictionaries and lexicographer infighting

It must have been tough going through life with a name like Mountweazel.

Sionnach, I've heard that current mapmakers have a similar mechanism to avoid plagiarists--planting a false "street" somewhere on a local map.

a fake word or name invented by reference-book editors to trap plagiarists. It comes from Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, whose (fake) entry in an edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia was a triumph of the form. (“Mountweazel” died in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.)

see esquivalience