<img alt="" height="1" width="1" />[b]Wikipedia awash in 'frothy by-product' of US sexual politics[/b]
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The world's Wikifiddlers are obsessed with santorum. Though they can't agree on what that is. For some, it's a word. For others, it's not: it's the result of a campaign to create a word. The distinction – however subtle – has sparked weeks of ...
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QUOTE(Newsfeed @ Mon 20th June 2011, 7:08pm) 
[b]Wikipedia awash in 'frothy by-product' of US sexual politics[/b]
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The world's Wikifiddlers are obsessed with santorum. Though they can't agree on what that is. For some, it's a word. For others, it's not: it's the result of a campaign to create a word. The distinction – however subtle – has sparked weeks of ...
View the article
Useful article. Three things they left out are—
1. The custom creation of three new templates (Political neologisms, Sexual slang and Dan Savage) that inluded a link to the "santorum (neologism)" article and were then added to more than 200 completely unrelated articles, driving up the number of incoming links
2. The nomination of seven DYK hooks on Dan Savage in one week
3. The way The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English was misrepresented. This honorable scholarly dictionary opined in its introduction:
QUOTE
As we drew from written sources, we were also mindful of the possibility of hoax or intentional coinings without widespread usage. An example of a hoax is the 15th November, 1992, article in the New York Times on the grunge youth movement in Seattle. The article included a sidebar on the 'Lexicon of Grunge'. The lexicon had an authentic ring, but turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by a record company employee in Seattle. An example of deliberate coining is the word 'santorum', purported to mean 'a frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex'. In point of fact, the term is the child of a one-man campaign by syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage to place the term in wide usage. From its appearance in print and especially on the Internet, one would assume, incorrectly, that the term has gained wide usage.
As one would expect, the dictionary didn't list the word. However, in the article this became:
QUOTE
The 2006 edition of The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English cited santorum as an example of "deliberate coining".[1]
Brilliant source summary, eh? "Verifiability, not truth" in action.
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