So there I was, casually glancing through a list of some hip’n'tasty neologisms breaking into the charts on Ask Oxford when I came across something absolutely and utterly ridiculous. Tell me if you spot anything wrong with this sentence:
Bluesnarfing: the illicit accessing of data from an electronic device such as a mobile phone, PDA, or computer using a Bluetooth® short-range wireless interconnection. The word made headlines when Bluesnarfers targeted the actress Paris Hilton and embarassingly made the electronic contacts list on her mobile available on the Net.
Uh. Excuse me? What? Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile Sidekick did NOT even have Bluetooth. Unlike most devices, the Sidekick handily backs up itself to a server-side repository - which the “Bluesnarfers” managed to “hack” into (in reality, they just guessed her password). I really wish that Catherine Soanes had bothered to read Peter Rojas’ lucid debunking of this incident in Engadget a few short months earlier. Oxford English Dictionary, you need a solid dose of fact-checking.
2 responses so far ↓
1 zephoria // Jun 7, 2006 at 2:13 am
Well, actually, you’re not entirely correct. The NYTimes introduced (and “popularized”) the term bluensarfing in relation to Paris. The NYTimes coverage was wrong on technical grounds, but it was the source of the popularization and it was in relation to Paris even though her Sidekick wasn’t bluesnarfed. So it’s a question of when a term is popularized regardless of the accuracy of the event that sparked it.
2 michael // Jun 7, 2006 at 9:13 am
Actually, I’m not disputing when the term was incorrectly defined and popularized by the NYTimes. The Engadget article that I link to is all about correcting that. The OED piece on the other hand is like a trap street left by the NYTimes. You’ll notice that they cunningly don’t attribute the source of the definition, although the NYT and Engaddget pieces were written nearl four months earlier on the 2 of March.
My beef is with the OED for not bothering to check their facts independently, and not attributing correctly, rather than the incorrect example that was used to popularize the term.
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