It's a deliberate copyright trap - a false fact placed in a book that allows the author(s) to spot when their work is plagiarised by another publication. But why is it called a mountweazel?
For that you'll need to go to Page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. There 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 states, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die 'at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.'
Ms Mountweazel was, of course, totally fictitious. But the ploy was so successful that her name is now the term we use for any kind of literary copyright trap.
In August 2005, The New Oxford American Dictionary gained media coverage when it was leaked that the second edition contained at least one fictional entry. This later was determined to be the word esquivalience, defined as 'the wilful avoidance of one's official responsibilities', which had been added to the edition published in 2001. It was intended as a copyright trap, as the text of the book was distributed electronically and thus very easy to copy.
The German-language medical encyclopedia Pschyrembel Klinisches Wörterbuch features an entry on the Steinlaus (stone louse), a rock-eating animal, originally included as a copyright trap. The scientific name Petrophaga lorioti implies its origin: a creation of the German humourist Loriot. The Pschyrembel entry was removed in 1996 but, after reader protests, was restored the next year, with an extended section on the role of the stone louse in the fall of the Berlin Wall.
One particular mountweazel led to a court case. Fred L Worth, the author of The Trivia Encyclopedia, placed deliberately false information about the first name of TV detective Columbo for copy-trap purposes. He later sued the creators of the board game Trivial Pursuit for $300 million in damages, as they had based some of their questions and answers on entries found in the work. Among them was the 'fact' that Columbo's forename was Phillip. The suit was unsuccessful, as the makers of Trivial Pursuit were able to show that the game was based on facts obtained from a number of sources and you can't copyright something that is published as a fact in a reference work.
Oh, and Columbo's real name is Frank, by the way. Although it was never used in the show, there are several episodes where he shows his badge and the name is clearly seen.
Fictitious places are also used as copyright traps in mapmaking.
The fictional American town of Agloe, New York, was invented by map makers, but eventually became identified as a real place by its county administration because a building, the Agloe General Store, was built at its fictional location. The 'town' is featured in the novel Paper Towns by John Green and its film adaptation.
Meanwhile, the English village of Argleton, supposedly just off the A59 near Ormskirk, Lancashire, appeared on Google Maps despite the fact it doesn't exist. When queried, a spokesperson for Google stated simply that it does experience 'occasional errors' and that the mapping information was provided by a Dutch company called Tele Atlas. Meanwhile, all Tele Atlas's spokesperson would say was they couldn't explain why these sorts of anomalies got into their database. It has since been removed but may have started life as a copyright trap.
And now we come to Dord.
Dord isn't a copyright trap. Rather, it is an incorrect dictionary entry that was carried over into other publications. It first appeared in Webster's Dictionary (2nd Edition) in 1934 and was defined as a synonym for density used by physicists and chemists. And it stayed there until 1939 when an editor figured out what was happening.
What the entry should have read is 'D or d' as the abbreviation for a measure of density (just as 'L or l' could be used as a shortcut for 'length'). Somehow, the spaces were left out and it became a word - Dord. And even though Websters removed it immediately, it carried on appearing in other works until at least 1947.
And so Dord is - to my knowledge - unique in being an unintended Mountweazel.
Unless you know better ...
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