Tag: language

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Spammers have been using misspellings, synonyms and malapropisms for years now. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Viagra/Cialis/etc. spam using the word “pilule” instead of “pill.” At first they’d just find misspellings for the drug name, but I guess some filters are blocking or scoring on “pill,” so they’ve substituted words for that…including the hilariously ironic “soft” as an abbreviation for “soft tabs.” (Comments on this post are going to give Akismet a workout, aren’t they?)

Anyway, I found it odd that so many different spams would use the same obfuscation, particularly since it looked like it was just adding letters. So I looked it up.

It turns out that pilule is a real word. According to Merriam-Webster, it entered the English language from French around 1543. Sadly, it doesn’t refer to a cute magical creature, but to a small pill — which means that (wonder of wonders) the spammers are actually using it correctly!

One question remained: was it simply an obscure word, or an archaic one? I did a search on Google Books and came up with mostly medical texts dating from the 19th century. Just about every match in the first 15 pages was either:

  • An English-language medical text published between 1830 and 1930.
  • French.

The few cases where I thought I’d found a more recent reference turned out to be reprints of older material.

So it looks like the word died out (in English, anyway) during the 20th century until spammers exhumed its corpse and pressed it into service.

Side Note: Twitterspam

On Friday, I posted the discovery to Twitter on @lol_spam, then retweeted it on KelsonV. Within 15 minutes, lol_spam picked up 45 new followers and KelsonV picked up 40. They were all obviously bots:

  • From the time that the second post was made, each of them followed both accounts, making it obvious they were automatically following based on a keyword search.
  • They all used the same scheme for the user name (first name + first 2 or 3 letters of last name + short number).
  • Many of them shared name components, as if a random generator were taking a list of first names and a list of last names and mixing them together.
  • None of them had posted a single tweet. I suspect that if I’d been foolish enough to follow any of them back, they would have started spamming me with links via direct message. (I caught a subtle one last week: someone had posted a series of inane tweets for the first couple of weeks, then switched to all tooth-whitening links.)
  • Several profile photos appeared on more than one account.
  • Many of them were following upwards of 1,000 users. (After the first few, I stopped looking at the numbers.)
  • All of them claimed to be women. (A majority? That I could believe. But every single one of them?)

I will give them credit for using ordinary-looking snapshots of women with a wide variety of appearances, rather than going for the lingerie, downblouse, outright nude (the spam filters are going to be busy, aren’t they?) and other sexy (or “sexy”) poses that usually show up on these. They actually looked like photos real people might use on their profiles.

Nice try, spambots.

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The Top 10 Reasons I Will Not Follow You in Return on Twitter is making its way around…well…Twitter today. Just reading the tile makes me wonder: why would someone expect to be followed in return? I guess it comes down to this question: What does it mean to follow someone? Is it different from friending them? And just what does “friend” mean in this context, anyway?

The way social networking sites use the term “Friend” has always bugged me. The actual software for Facebook, MySpace, or LiveJournal seems to use it to mean two distinct things:

  • An actual friend, someone with whom you interact on a personal basis.
  • An entity whose posts you’re following because you’re interested in the content, rather than invested in the person.

Wishful thinking aside, reading Neil Gaiman’s blog regularly doesn’t make me his friend.

Okay, so “Friend” is shorthand, but it brings in a load of connotations, blending the two meanings. People will freak out when a stranger “friends” them, will feel insulted if someone that they’ve friended doesn’t friend them back, or will feel rejected if someone de-friends them. I’ve heard it suggested that one reason people move from one social network to another is to start over with a clean slate of friends, and not have to worry about the drama of removing anyone from their current friends’ list.

Twitter, with the simple and direct term, “Follower,”, doesn’t seem like it would bring in the same level of baggage. To me, clicking “Follow” doesn’t feel like it has the same emotional weight as marking someone as a friend. I follow accounts that I find interesting, and that I actually have a chance of keeping up with. If someone follows me, I don’t feel obligated to follow them, and if I follow someone else, I don’t expect them to follow me.

So I was perplexed when I started seeing new followers showing up on my personal Twitter account who clearly had only done a keyword search on my latest tweet, or looked at who I was following. What were they expecting? That I would look at the “XYZ is following you!” email and trace it to their website? That I would follow them back?

It didn’t make any sense to me.

Of course, now I’m sure they were expecting me to follow them back. As this article suggests, a lot of people do see “Follow” as a synonym for “Friend”, and they were most likely trying to game that system.

In other words, despite the terminology, Twitter’s stuck with the same old baggage that clogs up other social networks.

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Went to the comic store on a late lunch today. As I got in the car, I saw the clerk locking the door. At 2:00, it seemed a bit early for closing, but then I noticed he had just hung up a sign that said:

AFK BRB

A bit cryptic to the uninitiated*, but probably completely understood by the target audience.

*And for the uninitiated, that’s “Away From Keyboard” and “Be Right Back,” common online abbreviations that have made the transition from IRC chat to modern IM. Though I suppose in this case it could be “Away From Kounter.” Oh, and IRL=”In Real Life.”

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I’ve held off on posting funny spam subject lines lately, but I just had to comment on this pair. First up:

Mazrim Taim was one of those, raising an army and ravaging Saldaea before he was taken.

It’s a quote from Lord of Chaos, the 6th book in Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, The Wheel of Time. The next one is a bit less obvious:

If Lan was attempting jokes, however feeble and wrongheaded, he was changing.

I wasn’t sure about this one, since there must be other stories with characters named Lan, but Google Book Search found it in book 5, The Fires of Heaven.

I’ve seen lots of spam that used filler from The Wizard of Oz and other novels old enough to be in the public domain. Project Gutenberg and the like have been transcribing them, making free plain-text ebooks for years, making it easy to snag a couple of lines of actual English text.

In theory this should be harder to identify as filler than randomly-generated text. Continue reading →

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This morning’s Los Angeles Times article, “A %$#@ slippery slope on raw talk?”, discusses the recent court ruling that relaxed FCC restrictions on inadvertent swearing. On one side, watchdog groups (and the FCC) are complaining that this could lead to swearing and nudity throughout prime time. (Won’t someone think of the children?) On the other side, the networks point out that it’s not likely to open the floodgates of indecency:

Broadcasters could air expletives after 10 o’clock “every night of the week,” one executive said. “We don’t for a reason, because we don’t think our audiences want to hear it.”

My take: this is a much-needed relaxation of rules that, frankly, have gotten overly uptight in the last few years. If an adult screws up and accidentally lets loose with stronger language than is acceptable on TV, and the guy with his finger on the *bleep* button misses it, chances are they both already know they messed up. Give ’em a slap on the wrist. The ton of bricks approach is unnecessary, and ultimately counter-productive.

It takes a spectacularly skewed worldview to think that the occasional slip-up in the heat of the moment is equivalent in naughty content to, say, a scripted scene from The Sopranos. Once a year vs. 10 times in every scene? Big deal. We’re not talking about murder, we’re talking about words—words that everyone (yes, including your kids) has heard plenty of times.

On a related note, the article brings up the infamous Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction, since it spurred the “war on obscenity” into action. Personally, I think the most disturbing thing about the incident is the fact that all the blame is placed on Jackson herself. No one seems to remember that it was Justin Timberlake who ripped off part of her wardrobe.

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After a great deal of painstaking research[1], I have uncovered the true[2] origins of the “nucular” pronunciation of the word nuclear.

Nukular turns out to be an abbreviation of “Nuke-you-la’r,” a traditional Texan leave-taking[3]. The phrase is a contraction of “Nuke you later,” and refers to the intense heat of a Texas barbecue grill. Essentially, one is saying that the other person is always welcome at a barbecue.

The word appears to have become conflated with nuclear due to their similarity, much as many people confuse affect and effect, or use infer when they obviously mean imply[4].

Nukular in its original sense has fallen out of use except in some rural parts of Texas, and most speakers are no longer aware of the saying.

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  1. In other words, 30 seconds of making stuff up.
  2. No, not really.
  3. Or greeting. It’s kind of like aloha in Hawaiian: it can be used for both hello and goodbye.
  4. This isn’t hand grenades, after all.