Factoid

 WORD OF THE DAY

factoid / noun / FAK-toyd

Definition
1: an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print
2: a briefly stated and usually trivial fact.

Examples
"A girls team from Silver Lake Regional High School has never won a state championship. The soccer program now stands just one win away from changing that factoid."
— David Wolcott, Jr., Old Colony Memorial (Plymouth, Massachusetts), 20 Nov. 2021

As a huge Peaky Blinders fan, here’s another Cine Lens factoid that intrigued me.
— Andy Meek, BGR, 16 Dec. 2021

Did You Know?
We can thank Norman Mailer for factoid: he used the word in his 1973 book Marilyn (about Marilyn Monroe), and he is believed to be the coiner of the word.
In the book, he explains that factoids 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."
Mailer's use of the -oid suffix (which traces back to the ancient Greek word eidos, meaning "appearance" or "form") follows in the pattern of humanoid: just as a humanoid appears to be human but is not, a factoid appears to be factual but is not.
The word has since evolved so that now it most often refers to things that decidedly are facts, just not ones that are significant.

Obsequious

 WORD OF THE DAY

obsequious / adjective / ub-SEE-kwee-us

Definition
: marked by or exhibiting a fawning attentiveness

Examples
"The service here is as traditional as the decor, with the obsequious staff as cheery as they are attentive."
— Anooska Tucker-Evans, The Courier Mail (Australia), 4 Dec. 2021

He could wear an oxford shirt and necktie and speak the local language, in every sense, and never act obsequious or look as though he felt out of place.
— Tracy Kidder, New England Monthly, April 1990

Did You Know?
An obsequious person is more likely to be a follower than a leader. Use that fact to help you remember the meaning of obsequious.
All you need to do is bear in mind that the word comes from the Latin root sequi, meaning "to follow." (The other contributor is the prefix ob-, meaning "toward.")
Sequi is the source of a number of other English words, too, including consequence (a result that follows from an action), sequel (a novel, film, or TV show that follows and continues a story begun in another), and non sequitur (a conclusion that doesn't follow from what was said before).

Garble

 WORD OF THE DAY

garble / verb / GAR-bul

Definition
1a: to so alter or distort as to create a wrong impression or change the meaning
1b: to introduce textual error into (a message) by inaccurate encipherment, transmission, or decipherment

2: to sift impurities from

3 (archaic): cull

4: an act or an instance of garbling

5: the impurities removed from spices in sifting

Examples

"We aren't very good as human beings at having good conversations in the first place, and then everything switched to Zoom, where body language often gets lost and signals get garbled."
— Andreas Kluth, quoted in The Daily Herald (Everett, Washington), 25 Dec. 2021

In 2013, Sahai and five co-authors proposed an iO protocol that splits up a program into something like jigsaw puzzle pieces, then uses cryptographic objects called multilinear maps to garble the individual pieces.
— Quanta Magazine, 10 Nov. 2020

Did You Know?
Garble developed from Late Latin cribellare, a verb meaning "to sift." Arabic speakers borrowed cribellare as gharbala, and the Arabic word passed into Old Italian as garbellare; both of these words also meant "to sift."
When the word first entered Middle English as garbelen, its meaning stayed close to the original; it meant "to sort out the best." But that sort of sifting can cause a distortion, and in early Modern English garble came to mean "to distort the sound or meaning of."