Just the fact(oid)s, please
Alex Beam's Boston Globe column riffing on Mailer's coinage 'factoid' — minted in Marilyn (1973) to mean 'facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper' — and on its persistent misuse, recalled through a complaint Norris Church Mailer once sent the columnist.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
“Just the fact(oid)s, please,” by columnist Alex Beam, ran in The Boston Globe on 23 July 2021. It is a light essay on one of Mailer’s lasting contributions to the language — the word factoid — and on the irony that the coinage is now almost always used to mean the opposite of what its maker intended.
Beam opens with a personal memory: years earlier Norris Church, Mailer’s last wife, wrote from Provincetown to scold him for misusing the word. As she reminded him, Mailer coined “factoid” in his 1973 Marilyn to mean 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.” The column then spins out a comic series of would-be successor words (factella, factilla, factini, and the rest) before circling back to Mailer’s place in the Oxford English Dictionary, which credits him with the first literary use of “factoid” — and, Beam notes, of “hi-fi” as a noun and the figurative “third base.”
The piece is a small but telling instance of Mailer’s afterlife in the language: a coinage that outran its author and acquired the very vagueness he had named it to expose.