I wonder where factoid came from, anyway?
I overheard the question and couldn’t help wondering too. I’ve never liked the word. Most people bandy it like a synonym for fact, with the qualification, perhaps, that it’s a rather small one. But if that’s the case, an obvious word like fact or statistic would do.
That’s not the case. A factoid is “an invented fact believed to be true because of its appearance in print” or it is, at best, a trivial piece of information, according to Merriam-Webster online.
The American Heritage Dictionary goes so far as to concede factoid‘s faddish popularity as a synonym for a smallish fact, but it says that’s a usage problem. The primary definition is: “A piece of unverified or inaccurate information that is presented in the press as factual, often as part of a publicity effort, and that is then accepted as true because of frequent repetition.”
According to various online sources, Norman Mailer coined the word in his biography Marilyn Monroe (Grosset & Dunlap, 1973)
by cobbling the word fact with the suffix -oid, which “normally imparts the meaning ‘resembling, or having the appearance of’ to the words it attaches to” (American Heritage).
Mailer’s book, however, is out of print and is neither available at my local library nor my local bookstore. I’m not interested enough to pay $3.99 for shipping that I may hold the artifact of, as my friend who first posed the question observed, “another one of Mailer’s dubious contributions to Western Civ.”
