Wherever you travel on the information highway, look out for factoids.
These tricky little creatures are bits of supposed knowledge that nobody has bothered to verify. They take on the aura of truth as they are repeated by people assumed to know what they are talking about.
Norman Mailer coined the term in a 1973 book about Marilyn Monroe. Mailer defined factoids as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper.”
The term must now be applied, it seems, to a standard item of background that appears in many stories about hedge funds — those fast-proliferating investment vehicles favored by the best and the richest.
