‘Gerbalism’? Where have we heard that before?

Delicious has a rather neat feature that allows you to see what are the most popular recent bookmarks for a particular keyword.

While  browsing a RSS feed of recent popular bookmarks with the tag ‘journalism’, we were somewhat amused to come across a blog post at the Toronto star with the title ‘Is it journalism or ‘gerbalism‘?

This rang a bell with some of the longer-serving members of Journalism.co.uk. A quick search of our archives revealed a story published on 1 April 2004 about the launch of a rodent-focused new ‘ezine’ called gerbalism.co.uk.

Now every rodent lover knows that gerbil ends in ‘il’ and not ‘al’ so it is doubly strange that this mis-spelled and entirely fictitious term should surface again five years later in a journalism-related blog post headline.

Which just goes to prove that there’s no fool like an old (April’s) fool and that it’s not just gerbils that have long tails…

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