Fun fact: the word “factoid” means a false bit of information that is being passed as fact. It doesn’t mean “a small interesting tidbit of information”.
Though I suppose the official definition will be changed since the proper one is seemingly dead
Quick edit: looks like it may have already been altered.
You know, it should be obvious, but until you brought it up here, I was guilty of thinking of it as just some colloquialism (which it very well may be). But if you think of the suffix -oid, taking “humanoid” for example, you get something that isn’t presenting itself as a human. But I didn’t come to that conclusion, I just was like, wow, they bop the Pope with a hammer.
Yeah, most lexicons being descriptive rather prescriptive makes etymology one hell of a twisted labyrinth. I agree it’s important for a lot of reasons. The last thing we need right now is a State enforcing some kind of “Newspeak”
Fun fact: the word “factoid” means a false bit of information that is being passed as fact. It doesn’t mean “a small interesting tidbit of information”.
Though I suppose the official definition will be changed since the proper one is seemingly dead
Quick edit: looks like it may have already been altered.
Factlet?
Lol, you could say your comment was a factoid.
Yeah, I was gonna make the joke, but got lazy.
It works under every definition of it, really.
Which means that OP used factoid correctly.
You know, it should be obvious, but until you brought it up here, I was guilty of thinking of it as just some colloquialism (which it very well may be). But if you think of the suffix -oid, taking “humanoid” for example, you get something that isn’t presenting itself as a human. But I didn’t come to that conclusion, I just was like, wow, they bop the Pope with a hammer.
So thanks.
Yeah, most lexicons being descriptive rather prescriptive makes etymology one hell of a twisted labyrinth. I agree it’s important for a lot of reasons. The last thing we need right now is a State enforcing some kind of “Newspeak”
A really fun factoid is that factoids being false information is not actually true!
Ow, my brains.
I love when a seemingly harmless meme becomes a linguistics debate and then just pure logic