![]() (I'm thinking for example of demonology, where I vaguely recall that a number of the fiends originated in Biblical misreadings. Interesting that an OCR error should spawn a new mythical creature, but given the nature of "imaginary flying monkeys", does the origin by itself invalidate their existence? I have the impression that much of folklore is based on similar misunderstandings and confusions. Filed by Victor Mair under Errors, Names, Silliness, Transcription.If he had not caught it at this already somewhat advanced stage, who knows how deeply the Hsigo would have become embedded in human consciousness. Here are some statistics (only a dozen page views per day).īesides the giggles provided by Googling for "hsigo", the more serious question becomes: how many other OCR ghost-words exist in the metadata? My friend randomly came across this page and only saw the mistake because he has studied Chinese transcription systems and monkey mythology. You can also find useful data under "External tools" here and here. On, another anon IP (72.194.66.67, Lake Forest CA) copied some silliness from this site or this site that the WP copyvio robot "XLinkBot" detected and deleted the same day. ![]() "RandyS0725" added the only ref on 23 December 2012 The Revision history is interesting (you can click through the links and check differences).Īn anonymous IP (24.16.165.234, clicking "Geolocate" at bottom shows Bremerton WA) started the article on 1 January 2005 I have been given permission to quote from Talk:Hsigo WP is all CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported License. If you want to see how such false entries begin and how hard it is to weed them out, read through the documentation below. It ends with a reference to what our Language Log colleague, Geoffrey Nunberg, calls "the 'metadata train wreck' of Google Books". This detective article is really quite entertaining and edifying. There's even a very brief Wikipedia entry for Hsigo, but I know a top Wikipedia editor who is endeavoring to liquidate that totally fictitious article as a first-step toward eliminating "Hsigo" lore from the Web and hopefully from circulation elsewhere as well. Hsigo are supposedly flying monkeys with bird-like wings, the tail of a dog, and a human face. I won't give specific references, because they're all complete and utter nonsense, but you can read detailed descriptions of these fake, mythical Chinese monkeys - including pseudo-learned discussions of their name - in works like the following: Erudite Tales, Creepy Hollows Encyclopedia, Mythical Creatures Guide, Encyclo, Societas Magic, Monstropedia, etc., etc. If you do a web search for "Hsigo", you will find thousands of references and hundreds of images.
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