January 11, 2023: Mountweazels Ripped My Flesh -

 In just the first week of Winter term at PSU, I’ve gleaned News I Can Use: turns out I once created something very much like a mountweazel.

The wholly fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel got an entry in the New Columbia Encyclopedia of 1975, as a copyright trap. (The NCE wanted to see if makers of other reference works would include her.) Here’s the New Yorker explaining the story, in 2005:

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 who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”

The New Yorker story ushered in an era where those traditional fake entries in reference works - dictionaries, encyclopedias, even maps - could be called “Mountweazels,” later just lower-case “mountweazels.”

(A portrait that shows up in Google Image search for Lillian Mountweazel)

My own mountweazel, like her predecessor Lillian, was a person, a writer named Jodie P. Benson. (My longlost colleague and co-mountweazeler, Teri, came up with the P, which she said stood for Poetry. I believe Teri also concocted some titles that JPB had written, but alas, I’ve forgotten them).

(Hitherto unseen portrait of Jodie Poetry Benson, non-identical twin of Lillian Mountweazel)

Ms. Benson appeared in a list of important contemporary authors that my bookselling company created in order to help libraries buy only the finest in new literature. I had the plum job of creating said list, and I was always annoyed that our archrival booksellers just flat out copied my work.

(Book about LVM)

(Not that we copyrighted anything – I asked about that once and was dissuaded. Not that we had any legal people on staff for me to ask. So JPB was mountweazel-ISH,  though she was not a classic copyright-trap mountweazel. I just used her to see how long it took the competition to add her to their list.)

You can find a whole lot of entries if you Google “mountweazel.” You can find this YouTube video on how to pronounce it: 

But – and this makes my day - you can’t find an entry for “mountweazel” in the online Oxford English Dictionary. I know because I just checked.  Three times.

It’s not that “mountweazel” is too new a word for the OED. COVID is in there, along with COVID crisis and other related terms. Fake news is in there.

I think the OED editors are leaving it out as a meta-joke. Mountweazels were created to catch reference-work authors who would plagiarize. The OED is so far above mountweazeling, they won't acknowledge the word exists. Well played, OED.

(Mounted weasel)

(Neither LVM, nor JPB, nor mounted, but a weasel nonetheless)