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Factoid

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Mount Isa, Australia, is often incorrectly referred to as the largest city in the world by area.

A factoid is a questionable or spurious—unverified, incorrect, or fabricated—statement presented as a fact, but with no veracity. The word can also be used to describe a particularly insignificant or novel fact, in the absence of much relevant context.[1] The word is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as "an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact".[2]

Factoid was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer described a factoid as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper",[3] and created the word by combining the word fact and the ending -oid to mean "similar but not the same". The Washington Times described Mailer's new word as referring to "something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact".[4] CNN's Headline News incorporated factoids into its half-hour newscast in the early 1990s under the direction of Jon Petrovich.

Factoids may give rise to, or arise from, common misconceptions and urban legends.

Examples

Neither Toronto or any other city was ever designated by UNESCO as the world's most multicultural city.

The following are many examples of well-known factoids, and the facts which clarify or debunk them.

  • Many residents of the Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia believe that their city is the world's largest or second largest city by surface area. In reality, Mount Isa is the second largest city in Australia; there are several cities around the world with larger incorporated areas. Their own local council web site incorrectly suggests it is the second largest city on earth.[5]
  • One belief associated with the Australian property bubble is that real estate value doubles every 7 years. However, “Take the city of Sydney - the Mecca of property investing. In 1890, the average Sydney home price was $1,446 (£723). If property really does double every seven years then, in 2009, the average Sydney home would have been worth $189,530,112.00.” Today, the average price of a home in Sydney is closer to half a million dollars rather than $189 million.[6]
  • The media in Canada have often reported that the Toronto was named by UNESCO as the most multicultural city in the world. Although there have been some reports suggesting that Toronto may be one of the world's most diverse cities (see Demographics of Toronto), the United Nations agency has never designated any city as being the most multicultural or diverse.[7] Nonetheless, the belief in this status persisted for years, even finding its way onto UNESCO's own web site,[8] into the pages of the New York Times[9] and The Economist,[10] and into international media reports in respect of Toronto's two Olympic bids.
  • The Great Wall of China is often thought as being the only man-made object visible from the moon.[11] In reality no man-made object can be seen with a naked eye from the Earth's moon. Given good circumstances one might be able to discern the result of some human activity such as the changing of the Netherlands' coast or the partial drying out of the Aral Sea, but even that would not be easy. Some astronauts have reported seeing the Great Wall from low earth orbit, among a number of man-made structures. In reality, a viewer would need visual acuity 17 times better than normal (20/20) to see the Wall from the Moon, and vision 8 times better than normal to see it from low earth orbit.[12]
  • Dogs and cats are often thought to be completely colour-blind and see the world in scales of grey. That is wrong. They do have colour vision, dichromate, but not nearly as good as that of humans, trichromate i.e. red, green and blue light.[13][14]
  • Many people in Texas believe that the Texas flag is the only state flag that can be flown at the same height as the American flag, because of Texas's former status as a nation.[15] However, in reality, according to the United States Flag Code, all state flags are displayed at the same height as the American Flag when on separate poles, with the American Flag in a position of honor (to its own right). State Flags should hang below the American Flag while on the same pole, and should never be larger than the American Flag. Moreover, Texas is not the only U.S. state to have formerly been an independent nation; Hawaii, Vermont, and California share this status.

Other meanings

The word factoid is now sometimes also used to mean a small piece of true but valueless or insignificant information, in contrast to the original definition. This has been popularized by the CNN Headline News TV channel, which, during the 1980s and 1990s, used to frequently include such a fact under the heading "factoid" during newscasts. In the United Kingdom, BBC Radio 2 presenter Steve Wright uses factoids extensively on his show.[16]

As a result of confusion over the meaning of factoid, some English-language style and usage guides recommend against its use.[17] Language expert William Safire in his On Language column advocated the use of the word factlet to express a "little bit of arcana".[18] Examples of the use of the suffix "oid" to denote things that have similar qualities but are not the same include asteroid ("star-like" but not a star), spheroid ("sphere-like" but not mathematically considered a sphere), and android ("man-like" but not human). So strictly by etymology, factoid—"fact-like"—would be similar to but not a fact, and therefore untrue. It is with this in mind that "factoid" itself, when used improperly, has become an example of the true meaning of factoid'.

The term was also used in the original introduction to the Friend of a Friend Semantic Web project, introducing a technical use of the term grounded in RDF technology: "Each new home page that appears on the Web tells the world something new, providing factoids and gossip that make the Web a mine of disconnected snippets of information."

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ Steve Wright's Book of Factoids. Harper. 2006. ISBN 978-0007240296. As read on his hit BBC Radio show "Steve Wright in the Afternoon".
  2. ^ Simpson JA & Weiner ESC, ed. (2008). The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition. Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-861258-3.
  3. ^ Mailer, Norman (1973). Marilyn: A Biography. Grosset & Dunlap. ISBN 0-448-01029-1.
  4. ^ Wesley Pruden, Editorial in Washington Times
  5. ^ Mount Isa City Council page suggesting their city is the second largest city in the world
  6. ^ Beware the Selling Machines
  7. ^ Michael J. Doucet (2004). "The Anatomy of an Urban Legend: Toronto's Multicultural Reputation" (PDF). CERIS - Metropolis Toronto Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement. Retrieved 2007-05-23. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  8. ^ UNESCO Best Practices for Human Settlements: Metro Toronto's Changing Communities
  9. ^ Clyde H. Farnsworth, "Toronto Journal: To Battle Bigots, Help from South of the Border," New York Times, Friday, 12 February 1993, 4.
  10. ^ City of diversity, Economist City Guide: Toronto, [1] (retrieved May 24, 2007)
  11. ^ See Great Wall of China's visibility
  12. ^ Norberto López-Gil. "Is it Really Possible to See the Great Wall of China from Space with a Naked Eye?" (PDF). Journal of Optometry. 1 (1): 3–4.
  13. ^ Cecil Adams, "Are cats and dogs really color-blind? How do they know?" May 1, 1987, The Straight Dope website. Accessed November 22, 2010.
  14. ^ Paulette Clancy, "Cats, dogs can see some color: Are cats and dogs colorblind? Do cats' eyes glow in the dark?" Ask A Scientist! October 22, 1998. Found at Cornell University website. Accessed November 22, 2010.
  15. ^ http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/texas_flag_only_one_at_same_height_as_us_flag_urban_legend/
  16. ^ Wright, Steve (2005). Steve Wright's Book of Factoids. HarperCollins Entertainment. ISBN 0-00-720660-7.
  17. ^ Brians, Paul (2003). Common Errors in English Usage. William James & Company. ISBN 1-887902-89-9. [2]
  18. ^ William Safire, "On Language; Only the Factoids," New York Times, Sunday, 5 December 1993.
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