Dictionary Mountweazels

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, hi, this is Mark Sackler, and I’m calling from Woodbridge, Connecticut.

Welcome, Mark. What’s up?

Hi, Mark.

Well, what’s up is a word that’s been on my mind for probably over 30 years, believe it or not, and that I’ve been looking for more information on, and until recently it’s been a dead end.

And the possible answer I came to was so preposterous about a word that’s incredibly preposterous that I wanted to put it to you guys and see if you could confirm or deny what I had found out.

Mark, this sounds really tantalizing.

Yeah, tell us the story.

Okay, so the story is back sometime in the 1970s. I was in my 20s, and my friends and I were very enamored with the game of dictionary. And we were playing at the house of an older friend. She had a 1943 edition of Webster’s Unabridged New World Dictionary. And again, I came across a word that was so preposterous that I never forgot it.

And the word was, and I couldn’t tell you for sure how to pronounce it, but it looks like Junkftak, J-U-N-G-F-T-A-K.

Junkftak?

Yeah, or Junkftak. And there was no pronunciation with it or etymology. All there was was the following definition. It’s a Persian bird, the male of which has only one wing on the right side, the female only one wing on the left side. And instead of the missing wings, the male had a hook of bone, the female an eyelet of bone, and it was by uniting the hook and the bone that they were enabled to fly. Each one, when alone, had to remain on the ground.

My heavens!

That was pretty amazing, yes.

So I didn’t forget this. I went to the local library and, to my consternation, could find nothing. I went to every dictionary, every encyclopedia, even looked for books on Persian mythology. I fear this has to be mythological. There’s no way there could be a real such creature. I mean, nature’s strange, but it’s not that bizarre. And nothing.

Two or three months ago, I did yet another search. I hadn’t thought about it in years. I thought about it again. I did a search, and I came across references to an article called The Incredible Jungfak, or Jungfak, however you want to pronounce this, written by Richard Rex at the University of Utah. It was a 1982 article, must have recently been transferred to Electronic Archive on the Internet. He had gone through the same odyssey, had even gone so far as to look for something by this description under a different name and couldn’t find it, even wrote to the publishers of the New World Dictionary, which were now a new publisher, different publisher. They didn’t know it. Apparently only appeared in that one edition.

And what he came up with that startled me was was that this is probably a bogus entry that was either placed as a practical joke or more likely as a copyright trap to catch plagiarism. And that, in fact, in subsequent research, I found that there’s even a term for such a thing, which has occasionally been used by dictionary or map publishers. It’s called a modweasel.

So I’m asking you guys, you guys are the experts. Can you confirm this? Do you have any idea that there might be any other origin here?

My gosh, Mark, what a saga.

This is like Moby Youngstack or something, right? The old man in the sea.

So this is an incredible story, and this is what dictionary makers do. I think your conclusion and the conclusion of Richard Rex is probably correct. This was an article in American Speech in the winter of 1982. It probably was a mount weasel, although that’s a more recent term. A mount weasel is an entry included in a dictionary so that any other dictionary maker who happens just to be stealing content will also include this fake entry and thereby be caught. And it happens. It does happen. The entries are included. People steal them. They are caught. And things happen. People lose jobs and are fired. I know a lexicographer who lost a job because that person didn’t validate the content. And as a matter of fact, I’ve written some Mount Weasels myself.

Oh, really?

Share your Mount Weasels.

Indeed, I cannot share them. I won’t even tell you what dictionary they’re for.

Yeah, because you can’t, you know, you don’t want to give up the goats on that. Occasionally they’re discovered and discussed. A well-known recent one is one that appeared in the New Oxford American Dictionary. You can find it on the OS X operating system, as a matter of fact.

In Mac, yeah.

Esquivalience, E-S-Q-U-I-V-A-L-I-E-N-C-E. And that’s a mount weasel. That’s a word that was invented just for copyright trap. And it actually did trap somebody. There was a New Yorker article a few years ago, I think 2005, by Henry Alford that mentioned it. You know, I guess after all this time, I’m sort of like relieved and fascinated by the answer. But I guess I sort of feel a little ripped off after a 30-year wild goose chase, too.

Or a wild Persian bird chase.

A wild Persian bird chase, right?

I would say, Mark, that there’s still a little bit of work left to be done. If you want to finish your life with this puzzle, see if you can track down the editor who put it in the Webster’s new 20th century dictionary from 1943. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it was a fellow by the name of Barnhart, but I’m not 100% sure of that.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

But, Mark, thank you for bringing up this really interesting little, I guess, sidecar of dictionary work. It’s one of these strange little things that map makers and dictionary makers do to protect their copyrights.

Yeah, well, guys, thanks for having me on. I love your show, and don’t take any wooden mount weasels.

We’ll do. Thank you, sir.

Thanks, Mark.

We should explain, by the way, what a mount weasel is and where it comes from.

And how it’s spelled.

And how it’s spelled. It’s M-O-U-N-T-W-E-A-Z-E-L. And it came about because in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia, the editors of that work included a fake entry for a woman supposedly by the name of Lillian Virginia Mountweasel, who was known for, among other things, her pictures of mailboxes that were published in a book called Flags Up. And supposedly she died at age 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.

Oh, my gosh.

And so this entry was indeed picked up and stolen by competitors. You know, they just stole the content and didn’t really end. And, you know, you get busted that way.

Right.

It’s like a little dictionary watermark. So Mount Weasel has come to become the word that we use in the trade of dictionary making to describe a fake entry that we’ve made up.

I love it.

Poor Lily Mount Weasel.

Well, what is the most curious thing that you’ve come across in terms of language and speech and words and dictionaries and all this strange mess of letters and sounds that we call language?

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