NOAD on Boing-Boing

That New Yorker article on the use of phony words to protect a dictionary’s copyright got some belated play on the seminal weblog Boing-Boing today. The article focuses on the search for the phony word in the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition (NOAD). Erin McKean, the editor-in-chief of NOAD, whimsically likens a lexicographer’s copyright protection methods to “tagging and releasing giant turtles” and then says this about the her outed, phony word, esquivalience:

As for “esquivalience” ’s excesses, McKean made no apologies. “Its inherent fakeitude is fairly obvious,” she said. “We wanted something highly improbable. We were trying to make a word that could not arise in nature.” Indeed, “esquivalience,” like Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, is something of a maverick. “There shouldn’t be an ‘l’ in there. It should be esquivarience,” McKean conceded. “But that sounds like it would mean ‘slight differences between racehorses.’ ”

LINK to The New Yorker ‘Talk of the Town’ piece.