Roxanne Shanté, considered by some to be a queen of hip hop, got Warner Music to pay for her PhD in psychology. Except, a Slate investigation says it never happened. [more inside]
posted by movicont on Sep 2, 2009 - 72 comments

A false etymology is "an assumed or postulated etymology that current consensus among scholars of historical linguistics holds to be incorrect." The internet has provided a platform for the rapid spread of some false etymologies - Snopes has posts debunking Picnic / Handicap / Buck / Crowbar. On the other hand, a folk etymology can mean "the process by which a word or phrase, usually one of seemingly opaque formation, is arbitrarily reshaped so as to yield a form which is considered to be more transparent." Other interesting anomalies of etymology: backronyms and eggcorns.
posted by billysumday on Feb 5, 2009 - 27 comments

Newspaper Snippet Generator
posted by crunchland on May 9, 2006 - 17 comments

When authorities arrested Omran Saleh and 18 others in 2003, they touted the bust as one of Cincinnati's biggest theft cases in years. The arrests resulted from a two-year investigation involving 160 officers from five law enforcement agencies. And then came the kicker: Cincinnati Police Chief Tom Streicher said the group may have netted as much as $37 million and funneled money to terrorists. The case has been unraveling ever since. (Neverminding those day-one convictions in print and on the internets...)
posted by airguitar on Mar 11, 2005 - 4 comments

BlueLight (Kmart) screws up Mp3 player price. But refuses to honor order requests. The Nomad Mp3 normally lists for $299 but a glitch had it listed as $29.99. Word spread, and many ordered, but Bluelight is refusing to honor the orders. Is this right or wrong? Granted this was a glitch, but what about truth in advertising???
posted by da5id on Apr 20, 2001 - 46 comments

Recently, MTV had a special on 'hackers' (scroll down to last weeks show), but apparently the people they contacted for background info didn't give them an interesting enough story. So the guys made one up. The guy behind it all says he was just trying to make MTV's journalists look bad, but that's restating the obvious. Of course MTV is clueless and goes to any length to create a story. The worst part is that MTV isn't alone in this, every news outlet does this. The nightly news looks the way it does for the same reasons, it's all about entertainment.
posted by mathowie on Oct 18, 1999 - 0 comments