79 percent of people use the word Factoid incorrectly
I was looking at Jamie Oliver’s Feed me Better website, and had to laugh when I saw their little ‘factoid’ on one of the pages. This is a partiuclar favourite of mine. The use (or should that be misuse) of the word factoid. 
Quite simply it means a piece of information that is actually false, but put forward as the truth. Repeated enough, a factoid is then believed by the general public. So, effectively it’s the same as an urban myth.
Here’s the definiton from Wikipedia:
Factoid can refer to a spurious (unverified, incorrect, or invented) “fact” intended to create or prolong public exposure or to manipulate public opinion.
and they go on to say:
Factoid is sometimes now also used to mean a small piece of true but often valueless or insignificant information. This definition was popularized by the CNN Headline News TV channel which during the 1980s and 1990s used to frequently include such a fact under the heading of the word “factoid” during newscasts.
Now I find this a bit strange. A word that means that something is untrue has been misused to such an extent that it’s now also accepted as meaning a bite-size fact. Which in some bizarre way shows the power a factoid can have - which is interesting seeing as 79.4% of people don’t actually know what a factoid is.
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It’s another example of the yanks perverting the true meaning of a perfectly good word. 99% of Americans are committed to destoying the English language - the other 1% just want to destroy the world… and that’s a fact… oid.
By Major L Fortiskew on 07.31.06 2:16 pm
Well talking of Americans, a future post I will write for the blog will be about the Creationism v Evolution debate.
A somewhat frightening statistic is that more than half of all Americans do not believe in the evolution of the species.
http://shorl.com/hadelidrydeso
..and that seems to be a fact rather than a factoid.
By Daniel on 07.31.06 2:35 pm
[…] Apparently, the Red's zonal marking that Rafael Benitez introduced is the cause of our defence leaking lots of goals. But this is merely another factoid that has been repeated enough times so people have accepted it as fact… […]
By Yappari » Lies, damned lies, and football commentators on 09.14.06 1:05 pm
[…] Anyway, back to Dave. The wikipedia entry for Dave Ulliott also contains further misinformation - more factoids: The Devilfish is another name for the Japanese delicacy tako, which is a poisonous fish which will kill if eaten without proper preparation. […]
By Yappari » The devilfish is in the detail… on 02.06.08 11:20 am
Great to see your site!
The struggle for the definition of the word ‘factoid’ is interesting.
A factoid is not necessarily “a piece of information that is actually false”. The word is constructed parallel to hominid (which is something resembling a human) or a spheroid (something resembling a sphere) or a geoid (something resembling the earth). So a factoid has fact-like features, amongst others which are not fact-like. That does not mean that factoids are ‘false information’.
(A small piece of fact, of course, is a factlet).
By Carsten on 10.27.09 9:30 am
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