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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

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Fetus@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
A really fun factoid is that factoids being false information is not actually true!

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- dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Ow, my brains.
  
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  - KazuchijouNo@lemy.lol ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I love when a seemingly harmless meme becomes a linguistics debate and then just pure logic
    
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Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Factlet?

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lenuup@reddthat.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Which means that OP used factoid correctly.

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Dozzi92@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

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Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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”

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