Comment on Put him on the cart.
papalonian@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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
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.
Which means that OP used factoid correctly.
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”
Factlet?
Fetus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
A really fun factoid is that factoids being false information is not actually true!
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Ow, my brains.
KazuchijouNo@lemy.lol 3 weeks ago
I love when a seemingly harmless meme becomes a linguistics debate and then just pure logic