What's in a name?

In the way that viral nonsense always goes, every few months I see a resurgence of a post (actually a collection of similar posts) which takes your first name and purports to tell you what its "deep meaning" is.  And of course, you're always told that your particular name means something like "Joyful Soul" or "Beautiful Dreamer" or "Fierce Warrior."

It shouldn't require my pointing out that almost all of these alleged meanings are wrong.  The Deep Meaning Generator doesn't give a flying rat's ass what your actual name is; it simply takes it and randomly assigns one of a list of pre-programmed positive-sounding results that are intended to make you think, "Yes... that's me!  Courageous Friend!  I knew it!"

Most western European first names are considerably more prosaic than that.  A few do have origins that sound like they could come from the Deep Meaning Generator; Reginald, for example, means "powerful ruler," which is kind of funny because these days Reginald is not generally thought of as being the most manly name in the world.  (My apologies to any Reginalds in the studio audience.)

A few of the oldest names in the European tradition go back to Hebrew.  A lot of names containing el or elle come from the Hebrew El, meaning "god."  Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Elijah, Elias, and Elizabeth (and the various names derivative from those) mean, respectively, "God's gift," "God's strength," "God's healing," "Yahweh is God," "God is Lord," and "God's promise."  Other names originating in Hebrew are John/Jonathan ("God's grace"), Joseph ("Yahweh shall add"), and Mary/Maria//Mara/Miriam ("bitterness").

A lot of the harsh-sounding old Germanic names have gone out of vogue, and some of those did have meanings that come across as wishful thinking on the part of the parents.  For example, the bert part in Albert, Herbert, Bertram, Gilbert, Bertrand, Bertha, and Robert comes from a Proto-Germanic root meaning "bright" or "brilliant."  But there are plenty of first names that have meanings that are simply weird.

Cecil/Cecile/Cecilia means "blind."  Emile/Emily/Emilia means "rival."  "Courtney" means "short nose."  Leah means "weary."  Calvin means "bald."  Tristan means "outcry."  Rebecca means "bound" or "tied."  Bailey means "manager."  Deborah and Melissa both mean "bee" -- in Hebrew and Greek, respectively.  Cameron means "crooked nose." 

And my own name, Gordon?  Gaelic for "hill dweller."  Oddly appropriate, since just about all of my ancestors were Scottish and French peasants.

But the reason I chose to write about this goes beyond looking at some strange linguistic origins, as fun as that is.  What I'm more curious about is why those Deep Meaning Generators are so damn popular.  Do people actually believe that what they're saying is true, despite the fact that you can find the (actual) linguistic origin of your own name with a fifteen-second Google search?

Or do they know it's not real, and don't care?

I honestly suspect it's the latter, because the one time I went against my better judgment and did the "Well, actually..." thing -- I hardly ever do that, because (1) arguing online is the very pinnacle of pointlessness, and (2) it's fucking obnoxious at the best of times -- I got a response of, "I don't care if it's true, it's fun to believe it."

Which I find utterly baffling.  I don't get any satisfaction at all out of telling everyone that Gordon means "Blissful Spirit" when I know it doesn't.  Plus, the bigger concern here is one that I've addressed before, in the context of the "What's the harm?" objection to believing in stuff like astrology and Tarot divination; putting aside your critical thinking facilities in one setting makes it that much easier to put them aside in more important settings, like your health.

I get that rational thinking is hard, and that the harsh reality of evidence-based understanding can be problematic when it comes into conflict with our dearly-held beliefs or desires.  But unfortunately, credulity is a habit, and one we have to work hard against, even when it seems harmless.

So those are my thoughts for this morning.  Sorry if it makes me seem like a humorless curmudgeon.  Hopefully regular readers of Skeptophilia will know I'm not humorless; as far as the "curmudgeon" part, my wife would be happy to discuss that with you at length.  But anyhow, as a linguist and someone who is dedicated to pursuing the truth, I'd really appreciate it if you'd stop reposting the fake Deep Meaning Generator things.  Because I'm tired of seeing stuff like people claiming that Wanda means "Heart of Gold" when it actually means "sheep herder."

Thank you.

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The Flannan Isles mystery

In the classic Doctor Who episode "The Horror of Fang Rock," the Fourth Doctor and his companion Leela investigate a malfunctioning lighthouse off the coast of England -- and find that it's under siege, and its unfortunate crew are being killed one at a time by something that appears to be able to shapeshift.

The culprit turns out to be a Rutan, an alien that (in its original form) looks a little like a cross between a giant jellyfish and a moldy lime.

The Rutans were attempting to wipe out humanity so they could use the Earth as their new home base, something that (if you believe classic Who) was the aim of every intelligent alien species in the galaxy and happened on a weekly basis, but for some reason this bunch of aliens decided the best place to launch their attack was a lighthouse out in the middle of nowhere.  Be that as it may, by the time the Doctor and Leela foiled the Rutans' evil plot, all the people in the lighthouse were dead and/or vanished, so this definitely stands out as one of the Doctor's less successful ventures (although he did save the Earth, so there's that).

There are two curious things about this episode that are why it comes up today.

The first is that during its premier broadcast, on November 22, 1987, transmission was suddenly interrupted and replaced by a signal showing a guy wearing a Max Headroom mask babbling about random stuff (including his opinion of "New Coke" and the television series Clutch Cargo) and finally ending with him getting spanked on the bare ass with a flyswatter while a female voice shouted, "Bend over, bitch!"

The source of this transmission -- which I swear I am not making up -- was never identified.

The other strange thing about the episode is that it's based on a true story.

Well, not the green jellyfish alien part, but the mysterious deaths/disappearances from a lighthouse part.  On December 15, 1900, the steamship Archtor was near the Flannan Isles in the seas off the Outer Hebrides and noticed that the lighthouse on Eilean Mòr, the largest island in the chain, was not working.  They reported this to the authorities, but bad weather kept anyone from investigating until eleven days later.

When they got there, the lighthouse was abandoned, and the three crew -- James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur -- were all missing.

There were plenty of signs of recent habitation -- unmade beds, lamps cleaned and refilled, and so on -- but no indication of what might have happened to the crew.  The lighthouse logs indicated nothing amiss other than some inclement weather, which is hardly unusual off the coast of Scotland in winter.  It must be mentioned that there had been extensive storm damage downslope from the lighthouse; a metal storage box thirty meters above sea level had been broken open, presumably by the surf, its contents strewn, and an iron railing set in rock was bent nearly flat.  Robert Muirhead, superintendent of the Northern Lighthouse Board, said some of the damage was "difficult to believe unless actually seen."

Still, it's presumed that the three missing men -- all highly experienced lighthouse operators, who had been on the job for years -- would have known better than to go out and walk the beach in the middle of a December storm.  The lighthouse itself was undamaged, so whatever killed its keepers seems to have taken place outside the building.  Muirhead's conclusion was that they'd gone out to try to secure the metal storage box that was later found damaged, and a rogue wave had swept them away.

There are two problems with this explanation.  The first is that there was only one missing set of oilskins, implying that two of the men went out into a raging winter storm in their shirtsleeves.  The second is that the worst of the damage seems to have happened after the lighthouse was abandoned; it was already not operating on the 15th, and the serious storms (the ones that prevented anyone from investigating for a week and a half) didn't start till the 16th.  It's possible they were killed by rogue surf and/or bad weather, but this doesn't really answer all the questions.

So of course, this didn't satisfy most people, and that's when the wild speculation started.  Sea serpents, an attack by the malevolent spirits of drowned sailors, abduction by foreign agents, and even that the three men had absconded so they could take up new lives elsewhere.  A logbook surfaced claiming that there had been a devastating storm lasting four days -- from December 11 to December 14 -- bad enough that all three men had "spent hours praying" and Donald McArthur, an experienced lighthouse keeper, had "been reduced to helpless crying."  The weirdest part about this bit is that contemporary weather records show no indications of an intense storm during that time -- as I mentioned, the seriously bad weather didn't really start until the 16th -- and certainly if there'd been a gale bad enough to trigger fits of weeping in a veteran seaman who was safely inside an extremely sturdy building on dry land at the time, someone on one of the nearby islands would have mentioned it.

However, the veracity of the entries has been called into question, and some investigators think the entire thing is a fake.

Then there's the fact that McArthur himself was said to be "volatile" and to have a bad temper, so another possibility is that there'd been a fight -- or perhaps a murder -- and after dumping the bodies into the ocean, the guilty party had thrown had thrown himself in as well out of remorse and guilt.  However, there was no sign of any kind of altercation inside the lighthouse, and no notation in the (real) records left by the keepers that anyone had been acting out of the ordinary.

So we're left with a mystery.  Three men in a remote lighthouse off the coast of Scotland vanished, and despite a thorough investigation at the time and a lot of speculation since then, no one has been able to figure out why.

Me, I'm voting for the Rutans.

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Weirdness maps

Seems like everyone you meet has a tale of some weird experience or another.

Ghosts, cryptids, time slips, UFOs, precognitive dreams -- taken as a group, they're terribly common.  If you don't believe me, just ask your friends at work or school, "Who here has had an experience that you were completely unable to explain?"  I can pretty much guarantee you'll have five or six volunteers, who will then tell you their story in painstaking detail.

Well, some folks based in Seattle have decided to create a database of all of the bizarre accounts they can find, in an attempt to keep track of "weirdnesses — dreams, ‘coincidences’, strange encounters, etc. — on a personal level."  They go on to explain, "We’ve long wanted to do something that acts sort of like ‘Google Trends’ (which tracks sudden spikes on google search queries) for the collective unconscious.  This map is an extension of that, because we’re trying to see if there are strange places or experiences that are actually quite common but go unnoticed because everyone is afraid to talk about this weird stuff happening to them."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rolf Dietrich Brecher from Germany, Strange wheel (36242991846), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The project is called Liminal Earth, and is open to submissions from anyone.  They categorize the stories (and map pins) into some broad categories, as follows.  (And just to say up front: this is copied directly from their website, so the subcategories are not me being a smartass, which to be fair happens fairly often):

• Dark Forces: Lanyard Zombies, Drones, Corporate Death Zones, Cupcake Shops, Etc.

• Time Distortions: Travelers, Timehunters, “Déjà Vu”, “Losing Time,” Etc.

• Mythologies: Pre-Shamanic Deer Cults, Radical Gnostic Animism, Etc.

• Cryptoids [sic]: Bigfoot, Lycanthropes, Trolls, Ogres, Etc.

• Thin Places: Ley Lines, Magic Fountains, Plant Sigils, Portals, Etc.

• Straight Up Ghosts: Creepy vibes, Poltergeists, EVPs, Stone Tape Theories, Class III Apparitions

• High Weirdness: Fortean Phenomena, Floating Toblerone, Things That Just Don’t Make Sense

• Classic UFO: Close Encounters, Sightings, etc.

• Strange Animals: Bearing Gifts, Unusual Encounters, Fecal Divination, etc.

• Visions: Dreams, Visions, Mystical Experiences, etc.

Okay, this brings up a few questions.

1. What is it with the lanyards?  The "about us" section talks about "lanyard'd ogres," so weird creatures with lanyards must be a thing.  Maybe the zombies with lanyards are reanimated dead coaches, or something, but I'm kind of at a loss as to why an ogre would need a lanyard.
2. What's a "Corporate Death Zone?"  I mean, it would make a fucking awesome name for a metal band, but other than that?  My personal opinion is that most corporate jobs would fall into the "shoot me now" category, but I suspect there's more to it than that.
3. Why is there a subcategory for "Floating Toblerone" and a second subcategory for "Things That Just Don't Make Sense?"  I would think the first would fall directly into the second.
4. I've heard a bit about "Stone Tape Theories," which is the idea that rocks pick up psychic traces of events that happen around them, which can then be played back in the fashion of a cassette tape, although considerably clumsier.  But since the majority of rocks have been around for millions of years, you'd think that most of what would be recorded would be kind of... pointless.  "It sure is boring, being a rock," is mostly what I'd think you'd hear, if you could figure out a way to play it back.
5. "Cupcake Shops?"
6. I was going to ask about "Fecal Divination," but then I decided that I didn't want to know.

I'm not sure what all of this is supposed to accomplish, because (as I've commented many times) the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data," but I suppose it's a start at least to attempt some kind of catalog of people's odd experiences.  The difficulty is twofold; first (as we've also seen many times) the human perceptual/interpretive apparatus is pretty inaccurate and easily fooled, and second, this sort of thing is just begging hoaxers to clog up the works with made-up stories.  (Although it must be said that I've never understood hoaxers.  I suppose the "five minutes of fame" thing probably explains some of them, but since growing out of a tall-tale-telling stage as a child, I've never understood the draw of inventing far-fetched stories and claiming they're true.)

Be that as it may, I invite you to submit your own experiences to Liminal Earth if you're so inclined.  I can't say I've ever had anything happen to me that seems particularly inexplicable, so I don't honestly have anything to contribute myself.  Except maybe that my home village used to have a cupcake shop that was wonderful, and they suddenly went out of business.  And I would definitely like an explanation for that one, because those cupcakes were awesome.

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Talking to the animals

Language is defined as "arbitrary symbolic communication."  The "symbolic" part is because the word (either spoken or written) for a concept is representative of the concept itself, and "arbitrary" because with the exception of onomatopoeic words like bang and swish there is no logical connection between the word and the concept itself.  (For example, the English word dog, the Japanese word inu, and the French word chien all have the same referent, but other than learned association there's nothing especially doggy about any of those words.)

It's been an argument of long standing whether any other animal species have true language. A 2006 paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America strongly suggests that whales have one of the most characteristic features of language -- syntax, the way words are put together to form meaningful sentences.  (What whale songs actually mean is still a matter of conjecture.)  A lot of animal sounds, such as bird songs and dogs barking, are dismissed as "non-linguistic vocalization" -- they are communication, but lack the "arbitrary symbolic" part of the definition of language.

Myself, I wonder. I can tell when I hear my dog barking or growling whether he:

• is playing;
• sees a vicious intruder, like the UPS man;
• sees an even more vicious intruder, like a chipmunk;
• sees or hears my wife driving up;
• is excited because he sees me or my wife get the ball and he knows he's going to get to play fetch, which is his most favorite thing ever;
• is bored; or
• wants to come inside because it's raining and he doesn't like getting his little toesies wet.  (He's just that tough.)

Each of those different-toned barks is completely distinct, and certainly they're arbitrary in that the connection between the tone and what it's communicating really has no logic to it.  (An exception is that the "excited bark" and "bored bark" are clearly different in volume and energy level, which you could argue isn't arbitrary.)

Even dog lovers will admit, however, that the set of concepts expressed by barking or growling is fairly limited.  So if you want to call it language, it's pretty rudimentary.  The situation becomes blurrier, however, with animals with a rich vocal repertoire, like parrots and dolphins.  And our sense that we're the only ones with true language was dealt another blow by a study from the University of Zurich showing that primates called common marmosets not only speak regional dialects, when individuals are moved to a different region they learn -- and begin to use -- the dialect of the group they've joined.

"We could clearly show that the dialects of common marmosets are learned socially," said anthropologist Yvonne Zürcher, who co-authored the study.  "If their dialects were genetically determined, moving to a new place wouldn’t cause any change in calls.  The changes can’t be explained by differences in the environment, either."

Which seems to meet the characteristic of arbitrariness.

Again, I'm not trying to imply that marmosets have language in the same sense we do; whatever they're saying, it's unlikely that it has the richness and flexibility of human language.  But the black-and-white, "we have language and no one else does" attitude that has been prevalent for as long as the question has been considered may turn out to be as inaccurate as the "human vs. animal" distinction I often heard students voicing.  The truth is, vocal communication -- from the simplest (such as the hissing of a snake) to the most complex known (human language) -- is a continuum, just as are complexity, intelligence, emotional capacity, and anything else you might think separates us from the rest of Kingdom Animalia.

Which I think is pretty cool.

In any case, I better wrap this up, because Guinness is barking.  I know it's time to play ball.  He just told me so.

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Desert world

Following hard on the heels of yesterday's post, about whether we'd be able to tell if there'd been a technological civilization on Earth tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, today we have a new study in Nature projecting the configuration of the continents 250 million years in the future -- and what that might portend for life.

We've known about the movement of the continents since geologists Harry Hess, Frederick Vine, and Drummond Matthews conclusively demonstrated in the early 1960s that convection currents in the mantle were dragging the tectonic plates along and shifting the positions of pieces of the Earth's crust relative to each other.  Of course, we might have figured all that out thirty years earlier if we'd just listened to poor Alfred Wegener, who proposed what he called "continental drift" to explain such observations as the near perfect fit between the eastern coastline of the Americas and the western coastline of Europe and Africa.  But because such an idea ran counter to accepted geological model of the time, Wegener was laughed out of academia -- literally.  He ended up taking off to Greenland to do paleoclimatological studies of the ice cap, and froze to death in November of 1930, never finding out that he'd actually landed on the truth.

In any case, what all this means is that the current configuration of continents and oceans is only the latest in a continuously shifting tableau, and it won't be the last.  Because we now have a pretty good idea of the motions within the known fault lines, we can run the clock forward and find out where things are likely to be in the future.

And the picture, unfortunately, doesn't look all that great.

The Atlantic Ocean, currently widening, will begin to close up, and by 250 million years in the future all that will be left of it will be two shallow landlocked seas.  Almost all the Earth's land surface area will have coalesced into a single supercontinent, which geologists have nicknamed "Pangaea Ultima" -- a misnomer, as "ultima" means "last" and this isn't the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.  The thing is, the projection is that this gigantic land mass will be aligned along the equator, one of three factors that are projected to make this a hot time for land-dwelling organisms on planet Earth -- the other two are the carbon dioxide released because of the widespread volcanism predicted to take place as everything smashes together, and the fact that by then, the astronomers are telling us the Sun is going to be 2.5% brighter than it is now.

The geologists are making dire predictions about what this will do to terrestrial life on Earth -- mass extinction being the gist of it.  

"It does seem like life is going to have a bit more of a hard time in the future," said Hannah Davies, a geologist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, who co-authored the study.  "It’s a bit depressing...  There have been extinction events in the past, and will be extinction events in the future.  I think life will make it through this one.  It’s just kind of a grim period."

Well, okay, it'd be grim if you took the species around today (humans included) and teleported them into Pangaea Ultima.  None of us would last very long.  But I'm not quite as pessimistic as Davies is about life in general.  This change to a planet dominated by deserts -- something more like Arrakis or Tatooine than the lush and verdant planet we now have -- won't happen overnight, and it's sudden change that usually triggers mass dieoffs.  Sure, it's likely that there will be a whole different suite of species than there is now, but hell, we're talking about 250 million years, so that was going to happen anyhow.

Give species time to adapt, and they do.  As Ian Malcolm put it, "Life... uh... finds a way."

Now, whether we (or more accurately, our descendants) are amongst those species that make it that far remains to be seen.  Very few species survive for 100 million years, much less 250.  But honestly, right now I'm more concerned with whether we'll get our comeuppance for our rampant pollution, out-of-control resource use, and burning of fossil fuels in a hundred years; let the hundreds of millions of years take care of themselves.

So that's our latest look at a future that really isn't as depressing as the scientists are claiming it is.  Although it's a little sobering to think that our descendants could be the Jawas and Tusken Raiders of the future Earth.  Those things are freakin' creepy.

And don't even get me started about Sandworms.

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Remnants of forgotten civilizations

As silly as it can get sometimes, I am a dedicated Doctor Who fanatic. I'm late to the game -- I only watched my first-ever episode of the long-running series about seven years ago -- but after that, I went at it with the enthusiasm you see only in the born-again.

The best of the series tackles some pretty deep stuff.  The ugly side of tribalism ("Midnight"), the acknowledgement that some tragedies are unavoidable ("The Fires of Pompeii"), the Butterfly Effect ("Turn Left"), the fact that you can't both "play God" and avoid responsibility ("The Waters of Mars"), the sad truth that you can sometimes give it your best game and still lose ("The Haunting of Villa Diodati"), the devastating fact that the ones orchestrating war are seldom the ones who suffer because of it ("The Zygon Inversion"), and the terrible necessity of personal self-sacrifice ("Silence in the Library").  Plus, the series invented what would be my choice for the single most terrifying, wet-your-pants-inducing alien species ever dreamed up, the Weeping Angels (several episodes, most notably "Blink").

So it shouldn't have been a surprise when Doctor Who got a mention an article in Scientific American, but it still kinda was.  It came up in a wonderful piece by Caleb Scharf called "The Galactic Archipelago," which was about the possibility of intelligent life in the universe (probably very high) and the odd question of why, if that's true, we haven't been visited (Fermi's paradox).  Here at Skeptophilia we've looked at one rather depressing answer to Fermi -- the "Great Filter," the idea that intelligent life is uncommon in the universe either because there are barriers to the formation of life on other worlds, or that once formed, it's likely to get wiped out completely at some point.

It's even more puzzling when you consider the fact that it would be unnecessary for the aliens themselves to visit.  Extraterrestrial life paying a house call to Earth is unlikely considering the vastness of space and the difficulties of fast travel, whatever the amazingly-coiffed Giorgio Tsoukalos (of Ancient Aliens fame) would have you believe.  But Scharf points out that it's much more likely that intelligent aliens would have instead sent out self-replicating robot drones, which not only had some level of intelligence themselves (in terms of avoiding dangers and seeking out raw materials to build new drones), but could take their time hopping from planet to planet and star system to star system.  And because they reproduce, all it would take is one or two civilizations to develop these drones, and given a few million years, you'd expect they'd spread pretty much everywhere in the galaxy.

But, of course, it doesn't seem like that has happened either.

Scharf tells us that there's another possibility than the dismal Great Filter concept, and that's something that's been nicknamed the "Silurian Hypothesis."  Here's where Doctor Who comes in, because as any good Whovian will tell you, the Silurians are a race of intelligent reptilians who were the dominant species on Earth for millions of years, but who long before humans appeared went (mostly) extinct except for a few scattered remnant populations in deep caverns.

The Silurian Madame Vastra in the episode "Deep Breath," played by the incomparable Neve McIntosh

A while back, astronomers Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank, of NASA and the University of Rochester (respectively), considered whether it was possible that an intelligent technological species like the Silurians had existed millions of years ago, and if so, what traces of it we might expect to find in the modern world.  And what Schmidt and Frank found was that if there had been a highly complex, city-building, technology-using species running the Earth, (say) fifty million years ago, what we'd find today as evidence of its existence is very likely to be...

... nothing.

Scharf writes:

[Astrophysicist Michael] Hart's original fact [was] that there is no evidence here on Earth today of extraterrestrial explorers...  Perhaps long, long ago aliens came and went.  A number of scientists have, over the years, discussed the possibility of looking for artifacts that might have been left behind after such visitations of our solar system.  The necessary scope of a complete search is hard to predict, but the situation on Earth alone turns out to be a bit more manageable.  In 2018 another of my colleagues, Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, together with Adam Frank, produced a critical assessment of whether we could even tell if there had been an earlier industrial civilization on our planet.

 
As fantastic as it may seem, Schmidt and Frank argue -- as do most planetary scientists -- that it is actually very easy for time to erase essentially all signs of technological life on Earth.  The only real evidence after a million or more years would boil down to isotopic or chemical stratigraphic anomalies -- odd features such as synthetic molecules, plastics, or radioactive fallout.  Fossil remains and other paleontological markers are so rare and so contingent on special conditions of formation that they might not tell us anything in this case.

 
Indeed, modern human urbanization covers only on order of about one percent of the planetary surface, providing a very small target area for any paleontologists in the distant future.  Schmidt and Frank also conclude that nobody has yet performed the necessary experiments to look exhaustively for such nonnatural signatures on Earth.  The bottom line is, if an industrial civilization on the scale of our own had existed a few million years ago, we might not know about it.  That absolutely does not mean one existed; it indicates only that the possibility cannot be rigorously eliminated.

(If you'd like to read Schmidt and Frank's paper, it appeared in the International Journal of Astrobiology and is available here.)

It's a little humbling, isn't it?  All of the massive edifices we've created, the far-more-than Seven Wonders of the World, will very likely be gone without a trace in only a few million years.  A little more cheering is that the same will be true of all the damage we're currently doing to the global ecosystem.  It's not so surprising if you know a little geology; the current arrangement of the continents is only the most recent, and won't be the last the Earth will see.  Because of erosion and natural disasters, not to mention the rather violent clashes that occur when the continents do shift position, it stands to reason that our puny little efforts to change things won't last very long.

Entropy always wins in the end.

The whole thing puts me in mind of one of the first poems I ever read that made a significant impact on me -- Percy Bysshe Shelley's devastating "Ozymandias," which I came across when I was a freshman in high school, and which is still a favorite.  It seems a fitting way to conclude this post.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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Beware the mountweazel

Ever heard of a mountweazel?

Mountweazel is an eponym -- a coined word based on the name of a person.  (Other examples are guillotine, boycott, sandwich, shrapnel, cardigan, and mesmerize.)  The word honors Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, fountain designer turned photographer, famous for her photo-essays on such disparate subjects as New York City buses, Paris cemeteries, and rural mailboxes.  Tragically, though, Mountweazel came to a sad end, dying in a devastating explosion while on assignment for a story with Combustibles magazine.

There's only one difficulty, and the more suspicious of you might already have guessed it.

There's no such person as Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, and never has been.

She was the invention of Henry Alford, writer for The New Yorker, who in 1975 created a biographic entry for the fictitious Ms. Mountweazel in the New Columbia Encyclopedia.  It wasn't just done as a joke -- funny as it is -- it was put there as a copyright trap, to catch people who were lifting entries from the encyclopedia in toto and putting them into other works.  The word mountweazel is now used as a term for deliberate false information included in reference works, usually in order to catch attempted plagiarists.

Other examples of mountweazels:

• The word esquivalience from The New Oxford American Dictionary, defined as "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities."  Which, if it wasn't a word before, certainly is now, because that's a concept we badly needed a name for.
• The German medical encyclopedia Pschyrembel Klinisches Wörterbuch has an entry for a Steinlaus (stone louse), an arthropod that eats rocks.  Its scientific name is Petrophaga lorioti, "Loriot's rock-eater," commemorating its inventor, the German humorist Loriot.  The Steinlaus is said to have been instrumental in the fall of the Berlin Wall.
• Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language had an entry for a bird called a jungftak: "jungftak, n. Persian bird, the male of which had only one wing, on the right side, and the female only one wing, on the left side; instead of the missing wings, the male had a hook of bone, and the female an eyelet of bone, and it was by uniting hook and eye that they were enabled to fly — each, when alone, had to remain on the ground."
• Numerous examples of fictitious places included on official maps, including Mount Richard -- a mountain on the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains of the United States -- which appeared on a number of maps printed in the 1970s.  Its nonexistence wasn't discovered for several years.
• The fictitious town of Ripton, Massachusetts was created -- as it were -- as an attempt to expose the ignorance of urban political leaders about rural areas they govern.  Before the hoax was exposed, Ripton had received a budget appropriation and several sizable grants.
• Before discontinuing the practice because so many people got suckered, Discover magazine included in their April issue a single prank article along with the usual real scientific fare.  Some of their finer efforts included particle physicists' discovery of a basketball-sized particle called the "bigon," a paper by a team of archaeologists about Neanderthal orchestras (complete with rhinoceros-bladder bagpipes, a mastodon-tusk tuba, and a bone triangle), and a study of the "hotheaded naked ice-borer," a carnivorous Antarctic mammal that could generate heat from an organ in its forehead, allowing it to tunnel its way through floating ice sheets and eat penguins.  The scientist who studied them, Philippe Poisson, was said to have been devoured by ice-borers himself while on expedition.
• A survey of food tastes created in the 1970s by the United States Army included items such as funistrada, buttered ermal, and braised traike to catch respondents who were selecting random answers just to get the survey over with.

While (as a writer) I certainly understand the motivation of frustrated publishers trying to protect their books from being plagiarized, there's a problem with all this, and it has to do with trust.  When we pick up a reference work, we expect that we can rely on its contents to be correct -- throwing in a false entry can have the effect of making people doubt the veracity of the entire work.  (Although it must be said that anyone who took the hotheaded naked ice-borer seriously deserved everything they got.)  Hoaxes can catch people other than the target Bad Guys, and you have to wonder how many people have followed maps that have "trap streets" or "paper towns" and gotten lost through no fault of their own other than a reliance on the good intentions of whoever made the map.

A map of Oxford, English showing Goy Close, a nonexistent street 

Another interesting unintended consequence of mountweazels, though, is that they can eventually lead to something real.  Like, for example, the word mountweazel itself.  I noticed while writing this that esquivalience doesn't get flagged by the software I'm writing on as a misspelling -- evidently that word has been cited  commonly enough that it's being treated as real.  A while back I wrote about a step in aerobic cellular respiration that didn't have a name, and when some high school AP Biology students asked their teacher, a Mr. Swanson, what they should call it, he said, "I dunno.  Call it the Swanson Conversion."  One of the students put the name into the Wikipedia article for cellular respiration -- and it stuck.

There are now numbers of college-level biochemistry websites that use the name "Swanson Conversion" for the formerly-nameless step.

So mountweazels are a mixed bag.  They certainly can be funny, but the idea of intentionally misleading people in a reference work -- even with the purpose of foiling would-be plagiarists -- is problematic to me.  And because languages are constantly picking up new words, the unintended consequence can be coining new words, turning a deliberately false entry into something that has at least some measure of reality.

All an indication that even when you pick up a reputable encyclopedia, dictionary, or map, you need to keep your critical thinking skills handy -- lest the vicious mountweazel run up and bite you on the ass.

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