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.