this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024

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What grammatical construction or use of a particular word do you have that you want to know is correct and proper? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by cheese_greater to c/asklemmy

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I find myself often winging it with "themself/themselves" and it seems to be like themselves is always colloquially correct when there are multiple preceding nouns you're referring to...

Otherwise if there's only one antecedent or whatever, its themself

Be gentle haha

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[–] JubilantJaguar 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Might have been an idea to factoid-check that claim in a dictionary before posting because it's not really correct.

Factoid (noun)

(1) an insignificant or trivial fact.

(2) something fictitious or unsubstantiated that is presented as fact, devised especially to gain publicity and accepted because of constant repetition.

Factoids are to facts what humanoids are to humans. It does not mean the "exact opposite" at all.

[–] BitSound 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

From here:

On occasion, a writer will coin a fine neologism that spreads quickly but then changes meaning. “Factoid” was a term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it’s not actually true, or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn, “Factoids…that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.” Of late, factoid has come to mean a small or trivial fact that makes it a contronym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as “cleve” (to cling or to split), “sanction” (to permit or to punish) or “citation” (commendation or a summons to appear in court). So factoid has become a victim of novelist C.S. Lewis’s term “verbicide,” the willful distortion or deprecation of a word’s original meaning.

[–] JubilantJaguar 1 points 3 months ago

The obvious rejoinder: if Norman Mailer wanted his neologism to keep the meaning he intended for it, he should have been more careful about etymology. The "oid" suffix makes the new definition more logical than his own one.

Counter-example: "homophobe", which is illogical but has stuck anyway because it's succinct.

Interesting points otherwise.

[–] disguy_ovahea 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The second definition in your quote confirms that factoid can mean a widely-accepted false fact.

(2) something fictitious or unsubstantiated that is presented as fact, devised especially to gain publicity and accepted because of constant repetition.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It's the original meaning of the word, coined by Norman Mailer in 1973.