What is a factoid?

As a personal blogger, I spend more than my fair share of time trawling around the internet skimming trivia sites and wikis in search of good guff to share with you.

In the course of my travels, I often come across blatant factoids. Mostly, I try to sift them from my posts but they are slippery and conniving little buggers and, no doubt, they occasionally sneak through.

But, what exactly is a factoid?

Besides being the bane of this blogger's existence, a factoid is a questionable, unverified, incorrect or fabricated statement presented as a fact without any proof.

However, I reckon the word 'factoid' can also be used to describe a particularly insignificant or new fact (that may or may not be true), without much relevant context. (You'll notice some snippets of information in my posts reek of this type of factoid-ness but I include them anyway because they are just too juicy to pass up!)

Norman Mailer coined the term ‘factoid’ in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, describing factoids as ‘facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper’. The Washington Times described Mailer's new word as referring to ‘something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact’.

Often, factoids are repeated so frequently that they become accepted as fact, sometimes becoming urban legends.

Here are three factoids that you have probably accepted at face value as true:

• Real estate value doubles every seven years. In 1890, the average Sydney home price was $1,446 (£723). If property really did double every seven years, the average price of a home in Sydney would be $189 million. It’s actually closer to half a million dollars.

• Dogs and cats are colour-blind and see the world in shades of grey. Moggy and Fido actually do have colour vision; it’s just not nearly as good as that of humans.

• The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from the moon. No man-made object can be seen with the naked eye from the Earth's moon. A viewer would need visual acuity 17 times better than normal (20/20) to see the Wall from the moon.

So, read with care those magazines and newspapers – and blogs, lest you be led astray by a colourblind moggy or a camouflaged factoid.

Image: jscreationzs