WHAT IS “HOAX”?

By Arifin S.

We do often hear the term of “hoax” todays. Let’s enrich our knowledge about it. There are a lot of definitions of HOAX, they are:

1.A plan to deceive someone, such as telling the police there is a bomb somewhere when there is not one, or a trick.

2.To trick into believing or accepting as genuine something false and often preposterous.

3.Something intended to deceive or defraud.

4.The English philologist Robert Nares (1753–1829) says that the word hoax was coined in the late 18th century as a contraction of the verb hocus, which means "to cheat," "to impose upon" or (according to Merrian-Webster) "to befuddle often with drugged liquor."Hocus is a shortening of the magic incantation hocus pocus, whose origin is disputed.

5.Hoax is believed to be a shortened version of hocus pocus, thus conveying the feeling of trickery and sleight of hand. April First, also known as April Fools' Day, is a day of hoaxes. Successful hoaxes in history: Orson Welles' War-of-the-Worlds radio broadcast in 1938 and the alien autopsy film footage made public in the 1990s. Do you believe the American moon landing in 1969 was a hoax? You're not alone. Six percent of Americans believe this event was staged.

A hoax, unlike an honest error, is a deliberately-concocted plan to present an untruth as the truth. It can take the form of a fraud, a fake, a swindle, or a forgery, and can be accomplished in almost any field: successful hoaxes have been foisted on the public in fields as varied as politics, religion, science, art, and literature.

A famous scientific hoax occurred in 1912 when Charles Dawson claimed to have uncovered a human skull and jawbone on the Piltdown Common in southern England. The human remains were said to be more than 500,000 years old and were unlike any 0ther remains from that period; as such, they represented an important discovery in the study of human evolution. These remains, popularly known as the Piltdown Man and scientifically named Eoanthropus dowsoni after their discover, confounded scientists for several decades.

It took more than forty years for the hoax to be uncovered. In 1953, a chemical analysis was used to date the bones, and it was found the bones were modern bones that had been skilfully aged. A further twist to the hoax was that the skull belonged to a human and the jaws to an orangutan.

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