Introducing the word "anomia" WS said i.a. "...there are words for almost everything under the sun (and beyond)."

I have encountered a need for a word a couple of times lately. The concept resembles "ghost word", for which I recently provided some material to Wikipedia, but it is not identical.

Example: an article author used a word "creosite", which looked like a typo for "creosote", and it had a link (albeit nonfunctional) to "creosite" as well. Now, I am fairly advanced in chemical matters, and I found some thousands of hits in Google for "creosite", but most of them looked unconvincing; after all, other people than that author can also create typos.

It took over an hour's work before I was confident enough to change the Wikipedia entry to "creosote", because it is very difficult to prove a negative; and it is a very serious matter to alter a correct entry to an error, with only one's own ago for justification. In fact, even now I have a strong suspicion that "creosite" might well be an obsolete variant (there are similar obsolete variants for other substances, such as "benzole" for "benzene" etc), or even a particular grade, like the difference between treacle and molasses. I am still woeking in it, and any comments on that point would also be welcome.

Be that as it may, does anyone in forum know of a word for a non-existent word, used in error, looking convincing, (in principle there could easily be such a word as "creosite"; in fact it appears in a book on geology for something totally different (but as far as I can tell, that is a typo for "coesite"!)) but a word that one cannot easily prove to be an error just because it "aint in the dictionary"?

If it were an error that had won its way to its own entry in the dictionary, then it would be a true ghost word, but so far it is just a persuasive error that is hard to distinguish from a rarely used technicalism. What should we call such an utterance? "Phantom word"? "Fatuverb"? "Miragon"? (No emoticon for "stumped"? Or "puzzled"? Sorry!)

Over to anyone...

Jon

Or misspelling.

WELCOME JONRICHFIELD

ghost word - an accidental word form never in
established usage; especially: one arising from an
editorial or typographical error or a mistaken
pronunciation (as phantomnation or dord)

*Webster's New International Dict., 2nd ed.

the worthless word for the day is: mountweazel

[see quotes]
a bogus entry purposely inserted into a reference
work: a copyright trap

"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.. she never existed."
- Henry Alford, The New Yorker Aug. 29, 2005

"And only publishing insiders know that a Mountweazel
is "a bogus entry purposely inserted in a dictionary
or encyclopedia as a means of protecting copyright.""
- William Safire, N.Y. Times Mag. Dec 3, 2006

You have a point of course; misspelling is a major cause, and there is reason to debate whether one should count finger trouble in the same category as a misspelling. That is an open question.

Some of the examples I have in mind are misunderstandings (wrong word, valid but incorrect, or even inappropriate in sense or syntax), some are misremembered utterances, misheard pronunciations, misread typography or orthography, or mangled technical terms, such as Collectotriccem gleespohroides, where the perpetrator meant Colletotrichum gloeosporioides. One that still rankles is the modern acceptance of the generic name Crematogaster, in preference to the less appropriate Cremastogaster. I sweated blood settling that one!

And so very much on. I have been following up the creosote/creosite matter and have found various versions of acceptance and various of sources of error, ranging from the coesite, to a word of uncertain spelling for various grades of chimney soot. Oh, and a respectable publication mentions creosite as a commercial product, a cheaper version of creosote, marketed in Europe during the early decades of the 20th century. Also, remember that if there is no serious basis for wondering whether the term is valid, no special term would be needed; we could simply call it a mistake. Here we mean a putative mistake, with strong grounds for hesitating about pronouncing that it is indeed a mistake.

Oh, and there even appears to some performing group under the name Creosite! I am not sure that I wanted to know that...

I think the whole thing goes beyond spelling, though I certainly include spelling, miss, Ms or Mr, as one factor. In fact I am surprised at the rarity of ghost words, given the sheer scope for meme propagation.If all of them were as difficult to nail down as this one, I am sure that we would have them in droves; we would all be conversing in a creole of permanently propagating verbal novelties.

The things people fash themselves with...!

Niiiice! Very nice! Thanks for that little lot. Your response sent me doing a bit of surfing; found this site:

http://grammar.about.com/od/terms/f/whatisaghostword.htm

and was about to refer you to this one anyway:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_word

I may find myself moved to augment the latter in the light of your contribution.

Cheers,

I would bet on simple fumble-fingers in your creosote/creosite example. The I and the O are right next to each other on the keyboard and I have certainly hit the one when I was going for the other. Your description of some of the others sounds like it's bordering on eggcorns, but your examples don't look like eggcorns.

O too have made that mistake; welcome, Jon.

Noce, Jackoe.

Wasn't Otoo a character (actually two characters (or two half characters)) in a JackLondon story?

Life is so unnecessarilycomplicated...

But I liked your welcome!

Thanks,

Jon

I would add something too...if my mind was functioning better today
Jon but in the meantime I'll say that it the same thing when making a quilt..some artists deliberately put in a block with an error in it so the quilt can be identified as theirs. Well we say that when someone notices that a block is back to front

For me that would only work if the quilt could heve every block wrong (in which case it might actially be right, right? Right!) Doc Ricketts in one of Steinbeck's writings (the non-fictional one about Baja California ... coming in... coming in...? "The Log from the Sea of Cortez"?) mentions that his father had a quality of genius, not that he was a genius or anything like it, but that he had a *quality* of genius: he was *always wrong*.

Humph! Sounds like any other father to me...

Certainly would fit mine.

Fits my son's, too. Nah, just kidding.

I feel sorry for your son (yukyuk).

If every block was wrong, then it would be a totally different design and not 'wrong' at all but also, it wouldn't be an example here, would it?

Can you pick the 'deliberate' mistake in my Quilt?

The Olive Grove  

Something seems off in the south-central.

The bottom left Diamond has a flipped triangle on its right hand corner.

counting from the bottom, in row 3, it's the middle right-left 'arrow' that has one of its blue pieces swapped with the gray.

Here are some images of Tivaevae from my home island

Cool, olly--but what, exactly, is Tivaevae, please? I can't tell if it's painting, embroidering, knitting, or what.

Try Here for an explanation. Most Cook Island families have them as ornamental pieces. We have one on our bed made up of literally thousands of little squares all stiched together by hand. My wife folds it up every night. They are also traditionally given to newlyweds as gifts.

Yes, congratulation to all three of you. Well done. I knew it was there but sometimes even I have trouble finding it.

Here is your prize.


Luke
olly
tsuwm




WOW olly

Beautiful. I enjoyed looking at those. I grew up in NZ, but never
heard of Tivaevae till now. I've just looked online at the collection in the Te Papa museum too and must visit when next over. Thanks for that info.

Beautiful. Very talented folks.

Thanks a lot for that tivaevae stuff; I had never heard of them and I think they are stunning. You lot amke for most rewarding correspondence!

Please join us more often! ! !

I read about a similar style from Hawaii in the quilting series by Jennifer Chiaverini (the Aloha Quilt.) Thanks for the chance to see some.

Since this thread ends up in quilting and embroidery I add the medieval-europe start of quilting. They even did quilted shoes. It's a lovely art altogether.

link

Thanks for the link, Branny, that's fascinating. It has given me an (as yet vague) idea for a project. Of course, I'll need to learn a bit about stitching, and such.