The word “factoid,” I learned this week, is not a word for “‘factlet; or a ‘little bit of arcana,’ which is the CNN meaning,” as William Safire put it. Instead, it comes from Norman Mailer’s picture-book biography of Marilyn Monroe (“It has been obvious for some time,” said a 1980 book review in the New York Times, “that Marilyn Monroe is a character Norman Mailer would have liked to invent”). Factoids, in Mailer’s coinage, are “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.”

At the risk of inventing a cute neologism, what we have in journalism right now is a culture replete with “offensoids” — phrases or linguistic slights that had no inherently offensive existence prior to being declared as such by a magazine or newspaper. Sometimes, these come from journalists themselves, other times from outside pressure campaigns.