What the heck is a mountweazel?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been looking through a 2025 book by Martha Barnette titled Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland. A mountweazel is a phony entry put into a reference book in order to catch plagiarists. On page 293 Martha says:

 

“Such copyright traps aren’t limited to dictionaries and encyclopedias. Cartographers have been known to insert nonexistent features such as so-called trap streets and paper towns in their maps to catch anyone stealing their work.

 

The word mountweazel derives from a bogus entry in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. The entry describes Lillian Mountweazel, supposedly a promising young photographer from Bangs, Ohio, who met an untimely end. Clearly someone had fun writing it:

 

‘Mountweasel, Lillian Virginia, 1942-73, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio, Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris, and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972). Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.’ “

 

When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, I noticed that the Gulf Oil map of the city contained a trap street in Schenley Park – a bogus connection between Schenley Drive and West Circuit Road.

 

And when I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity printed and sold the student directory. Anyone who tried to use that publication for a mailing list got a cease-and-desist letter from the attorney for Alpha Phi Omega. A friend of mine told me that one mountweazel used his actual home address along with the fictitious name Wadza Duckworth (What’s a duck worth?). Another mountwezel was a phony address for a real person in what now is Wean Hall. It was a room number for the telephone equipment closet in the back of another room.

 

The mountain cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.