Medireview
From Free net encyclopedia
Medireview was an "accidental" neologism for medieval, coined in 2001 as the result of an issue with Yahoo!'s email service.
In 2001 Yahoo! silently introduced an email filter which changed some strings in HTML emails considered to be dangerous. While it was intended to stop spreading JavaScript viruses, no attempts were made to limit these string replacements to script sections and attributes, out of fear this would leave some loophole open.
The list of replacements:
Javascript → java-script Jscript → j-script Vbscript → vb-script Livescript → live-script Eval → review Mocha → espresso Expression → statement
An unintended side-effect of this was the change of medieval to medireview. Unfortunately not all email recipients recognised this as an error or may have even thought it was a recent innovation. As of 2004 there are still web pages seen which use medireview instead of medieval.
While individuals promoting their neologisms on the internet is quite common, the medireview case is the best known of some rare cases where this happened by accident.