Dord a ghost word

Sixty-nine years ago today, a ghost word was outed from its hiding place on page 771 of Webster's New International Dictionary, where it had spent five comfortable years. Dord started life on a slip of paper prepared by the lexicon's chemistry editor, who noted that "D or d" was an abbreviation for density. A serendipitous misinterpretation saw the entry being read as a single word, dord, and it was accordingly registered and printed up as a noun with the meaning "density." No proofreader caught the error, but five years later an editor noticed the word had no etymology and began the investigation that led to the word's being banished.
Quote: "...for why shouldn't dord mean density?" — Philip Babcock Gove

Air Force Security in Washington

One night at McChord Air Force Base in Washington, I was dispatched to check out the security fence where an alarm had gone off. The fence was at the end of the base runway. When I got to the scene, I found that a raccoon was the culprit, so I ran around and flapped my arms to scare off the animal. Suddenly an air-traffic controller came over the public-address system and announced loudly, "Attention to the airman at the end of the runway. You are cleared for takeoff."
-- Chad Blake

Historical Facts on 05 February

• United Artists: US film company was founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith (1919)
• Reader's Digest: DeWitt and Lila Wallace published their first issue of condensed articles; the pocket-sized volume cost 25 cents (1922)
• Tybee bomb: the US lost a hydrogen bomb off the coast of Georgia; some 14 nuclear weapons are known to be missing from the US arsenal alone (1958)
• Alan Shepard: astronaut became the first person to golf on the moon (1971)