Mountweazels

Suppose you publish a valuable reference work — one that required a large investment to create, and therefore is worth protecting? For example, if you publish an encyclopedia or a dictionary, you don’t want other publishers to simply copy your hard work.

I would have guessed that there really wasn’t a big problem here, as it would seem obvious on inspection that a work had been copied. But apparently this is not the case. In fact, the publishers resort to inserting fake articles in encyclopedias, and fake words in dictionaries, precisely so that they can prove in court that a work was copied and not independently created.

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on this phenomenon, talking about the search for the fake words in the New Oxford American Dictionary. There’s quite a debate going on in the world of lexicographical authorities.

Oh, and Mountweazels — here’s the explanation for that:

Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and 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 indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”