Many years ago, Norris Church, the sixth (and last) wife of the novelist Norman Mailer, wrote me from their Provincetown home to complain about my misuse of the word “factoid.”
She pointed out that her husband had coined the word in his 1973 book about Marilyn Monroe, “Marilyn,” and that it meant not “an odd little fact,” but “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.”