It’s not easy to compile a reference work like a dictionary, encyclopedia, or even a more topical work that provides information about, say, music, or wine. It seems like whenever there’s a task that’s inherently difficult, somebody will try to take a shortcut. And with something like a reference book, the easiest shortcut of all is to just copy somebody else’s — either the whole thing, or selected entries.
Now that we’re nearly 500 years into the copyright age of human civilization, we’ve managed to work out two things. One is that you’re not supposed to copy somebody else’s work and present it as your own. The other is that people try to get away with it anyway. Authors and editors who create reference books are just as aware of this as anybody, and many reference works include a defense mechanism: the inclusion of one or more fake entries.
The thinking behind these fake entries is that real users looking up, say, a wine in a wine guide are most likely looking for information about a wine they’ve actually encountered of heard of, so they’re probably not going to look at the entry, for example, for “Via Gra.” “Via Gra” doesn’t exist; it’s a fake entry inserted into a guide by Robert Parker. If Parker sees “Via Gra” in some other wine guide, well…gotcha!
The New Oxford American Dictionary has at least one of these entries too: “esquivalience.” It’s defined as shirking of duty — and when they made it up, they might have been thinking about people who shirk the duty of making their own legitimate dictionary. The New Grove Dictionary of Music has one of these as well, in the entry for the composer “Esrum-Hellerup.”
However, this being English, it occurred to several people that we need a word for intentionally fake entries in a reference book. And so, this still being English, we have not one but two. The first is “nihilartikel.” This is a formation made from “nihil,” Latin for nothing, and the German word “artikel” (article), so it literally means a “nothing article.”
The etymologists and lexicographers who came up with “nihilartikel” just made it up, but then it turned out to be an actual German word, although a pretty rare one. So another word was clearly needed, and the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia provided just the thing: “mountweazel.” It seems that there’s a fake entry (a nihilartikel!) in that encyclopedia for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, and calling a nihilartikel a “mountweazel” is much more amusing than calling it a “Via Gra,” an Esrum-Hellerup,” or even a “zzxjoanw,” which is a fake entry in “The Music Lover’s Encyclopedia” from back in 1903. (A zzxjoanw was supposed to be a kind of Maori drum, which was news to Maori drummers, whose alphabet doesn’t even include “x,” “z,” or “j.”)
The mountweazel system seems to be fraying at the edges in the Internet age, however. Now that evidence and actual reality have apparently become optional, you might notice that Lillian Virginia Mountweazel has a Facebook page. Appropriately enough, her picture shows her holding a camera. As you’d find in her 1975 encyclopedia entry (it’s on page 1850), she was an American photographer who published a book of photos of mailboxes. She died tragically in 1973 in an explosion while working on an assignment for a magazine called “Combustibles.” Nevertheless, the curator of the Monster Truck Gallery in Dublin in 2009 commissioned works by 6 artists to commemorate events in her life. That last bit is actually true— but the artists knew it was a spoof.
