[Terr_]

Since we're already being picky about languages, that's not a factoid: Factoids are things which resemble facts, but aren't actually facts.

The whole -oid suffix, really. Asteroids aren't really stars, meteoroids aren't really meteors, androids aren't really men, spheroids aren't really spheres, factoids aren't really facts, etc.

[aspenmayer]

> Factoids are things which resemble facts, but aren't actually facts.

I think you might be right but not definitively so: the Oxford dictionary has your definition, as does the New Oxford American dictionary which also lists the following as North American usage:

> a brief or trivial item of news or information

[Terr_]

Yeah, but that's the same lax descriptivist school that also tell you "literally" and "I could care less" should somehow be accepted as the exact opposites, they're just wrong. :p

Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural? At what point does something that began as an unambiguous error become rescued by the popularity of the mistake?

[aspenmayer]

As we don’t have an official or authoritative body that determines “proper” English usage as other languages do, appealing to a dictionary strikes me as a mite better than prescriptivism or pedantry, though I don’t think was your intention either.

> Is it equally accepted for "peoples" to be possessive and "people's" to be plural?

That’s entirely unrelated and uncontroversial; one is the plural of a “people,” as in multiple distinct groups of folks with shared culture, nationality, or other traits, whereas the other is the possessive form of a word that is already plural, so I’m not sure if that’s a red herring or if you’ve actually seen such incorrect usage being advocated for.

[rerdavies]

The entire English language is a series of unambiguous errors that have been rescued by the popularity of the mistake. Were it not, we would be speaking some version of Ur-German.

[Terr_]

That's just survivorship bias on a very long timeframe: Given enough time everything accumulates the status of "historical mistake", but what about the hundreds of thousands of words that didn't change and the days they didn't change in? Quite reasonably, we just don't pay attention to the mistakes that were squelched or whose trajectory never broke the ceiling of temporary slang.

There are some analogies to biology. Virtually all our DNA is the result of an error at some point (barring creationist theories) but that backstory isn't a reason to dismiss concerns against (or even for) a particular mutation. Surely nobody would downplay the drop of 3 base-pairs as "acktually normal when you look at the big picture for our species" when talking to people suffering from Cystic Fibrosis.

[mkehrt]

http://communitiesofnativespeakerscantbewrongaboutwhatwordsm...

I'll add "factoid."

[Terr_]

Hypocrisy: You're just claiming a different community of native speakers are wrong.

For some of the samples on that site, it'd question whether they even have majority-support as "correct" when brought to people's conscious attention, as opposed to simply being a popular mistake they don't object-to. (Do any polls exist? The nature of the content evades easy search-terms.)