Most chickens take decades to hatch. This one arrived on a Sunday morning with a timestamp. Asked why a press secretary had given a provably wrong crowd count, a White House counselor explained that he had offered “alternative facts.” The interviewer’s reply, that alternative facts are falsehoods, is the entire argument of this site in five words.

The phrase is interesting because it was too honest to work. Most euphemisms are chosen for their plausibility; this one exposed the mechanism so plainly that it became a joke within the hour. That is the theatre Mamet describes: an audience that can see the gap between the words and the thing laughs, and the spell is broken.

It is listed here as the rare specimen that failed in public. Most of the entries in this dictionary succeeded.