ferreting around on the web

A friend happened to comment that the latest edition of the Radio Times had meerkats on the front cover.

This got me wondering why meerkats hadn’t been “invented” when I was in school – they’re like an internet meme that sprang fully-formed in the public consciousness just a few years ago – and I did a quick bit of on-line research.

Having worked for an on-line magazine that required verification from “three reliable sources” before anything could be included in a story, I have a praeternatural dislike of wikipedia as a work of reference. Even so, it does crop up on the first page of results for just about any search on Google, so that’s where I ended up looking at information about meerkats, stoats, weasels etc.

And I was delighted to find this:

 
When someone decides to clean up the page and remove those weasel words, I fear that this phrase will have to go:

There is much confusion when trying to spot the difference between a stoat and weasel, however these difficulties have been overcome by taxonomic specialists who follow a simple rule ‘Weasels are weasely spotted and stoats are stoataly different’.

Which is a pity.

As I say, I can’t trust a reference work that is compiled by the masses; but it’s reassuring to find that some of those masses have a sense of humour as bad as my own and that they remember jokes from my childhood.