Reply #3: Just a note on the word "factoid"

[OKIsItJustMe]

Although it's come to popularly be used to mean a briefly stated fact (I remember when CNN started putting "factoids" on the screen) that's not the original meaning of the word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid

A factoid is a questionable or spurious—unverified, incorrect, or fabricated—statement formed and asserted as a fact, but with no veracity. The word appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as "something which becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true." However, the word can sometimes mean, instead, an insignificant but true piece of information. In either formulation, factoids are potentially factual, just not self-evidently so.

Factoid was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer described a factoid as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper", and created the word by combining the word fact and the ending -oid to mean "similar but not the same". The Washington Times described Mailer's new word as referring to "something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact".

Factoids may give rise to, or arise from, common misconceptions and urban legends.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/factoid?jss=0