writers.com newsletter

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Writers on the Net
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Vol. 7, No. 6
June 2004

IN THIS ISSUE:

THE POETRY & INSPIRATION OF...SPAM?
~~CLASS SCHEDULE~~ [to current class schedule page]
WORD PLAY: "antagonyms"
PUNCTUATION POINTER: Academic Degrees
ROOTS: bridal, bride, bridegroom, bridesmaid, honeymoon
~~NEWSLINKS~~
QUOTATION

THE POETRY & INSPIRATION OF... SPAM?

Writers find inspiration in odd places, but we're willing to wager that most of you have not seen "spam" email as a particularly positive source of creativity. But if you stop to think, spammers, like writers, must work imaginatively with words. In their ever-hopeful mission to slip unwanted missives into your emailboxes, they (or the software they create) must be quite ingenuous when textually assaulting the barriers we erect against them.

At the moment, the most accurate method of stopping spam by "filtering" it is supposedly the "Bayesian" filter (also known as statistical content-based or chi-squared filtering). An overly simple explanation: a Bayesian filter recognizes spam by looking at the words an email message contains. Every word (referred to, for some reason, as "tokens") in an email is considered and calculated against its probability of being found in spam or desired email. The filter "learns" to distinguish the spam from the legitimate by looking at the tokens in the actual mail sent to you. (For more accurate explanations see: What You Need to Know About Bayesian Spam Filtering and A Plan for Spam.)

Spammers have had to get particularly inventive to avoid Bayesian filtering. One method to defeat it has been to add "real" prose to spam emails. If the message looks exactly like legitimate email, then it will get through the filter. Some will use pure strings of words that are pure gibberish or "random noise". (I've also heard these referred to as "garbage words" and "hash busting." Some filters compare incoming messages using a technique referred to as "hashing.")

Others feel "real writing" is more effective at hash busting. But "real writing" is hard to fake, so literature in the public domain (such as you'll find in the free e-texts found at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere) has been cut-and-pasted into email to make it appear legit. Yes, Charles Dickens or Edgar Allan Poe may have been exploited in order to slip past your filter.

Including unusual words in the subject header is another way to try to avoid a filter and it's here that we've found a certain poetry in the words so employed as well as, occasionally, some potential for vocabulary building. Some poets have even used spam and the "cut-up method" method so beloved by William S. Burroughs (a method of literary collage in which text is cut up and rearranged) to create. The randomness and "rarity" of words assist spammers, so, to an extent, they are already using digital cut-up to create (albeit for commercial rather than poetic purpose.)

Here are a few samples of interesting words and juxtapositions taken from my current "trash" mailbox:

espadrille mirrors
soft arithmetic
frisky calligraphy
squid 9 tenors
grosgrain ecology
cursive feathery
jocular vorticity
lunatic somnambulist
curio chaw
impresario 12 dissidents
arboretum sorcery
maestro fetishists inside 37
necromancer debutante

In this AM's spam I found these strings as subject lines (although only the first six or so words actually appeared in the mailbox), not within the body of the text:

descendent saud barr bile whittle grammatic amphibology guttural dominican blazon embark particular incumbent

alcoholism attainder e'er datum clock annalen yearbook litton fastidious dodecahedron islam colonnade affidavit today roomy china counterattack constitute phosphorylate extol condescend actinolite gum diopter castro receptor

grandniece television bavaria bette northrup jupiter elkhart withdraw matrimonial counterargument biennial blend humerus tansy insurance ague butterball amp capistrano gratitude punish meliorate hamburg fontainebleau peabody trinity brag afforest crumb jefferson ganglion registrable

But these are not the only uses of spam. In a further effort to fool you, the spam comes "from" a variety of interesting fictitious names. Looking for character names? You have a fresh list daily! As for inspiration, what writer could not help but speculate about the ethnic heritage and exotic possibilities of "Jesus Yang" or "Thahn Rossi" or "Guadalupe Patel"?

Here are a few more gathered for your consideration or potential use:

Marquita A. Drumm
Romeo Weir
Shawna Stewart
Sterling Reese
Sybil Heller
Thaddeus Vaughn
Gabriela Espinoza
Erwin M. Snyder
Eula Gold
Rigoberto Engle
Son York
Odessa Wills

Everything -- even junk (email) -- can be valuable to you as a writer.

* * *

NOTE:

I knew I sould not have been the first to notice the "poetry" of spam. Sure enough, while researching this article I discovered two good stories you might be interested in: Random Acts of Spamness at Wired.com
Spammers turn to classic prose from the BBC.

If you would like to know more on Burroughs and the cut-up technique, here is an excerpt from Jenny Skerl's books, William Burroughs.

And here is a "Cut-up Machine" with which to create.

Or you might be interested in TextWorx Toolshed, "A collections of programs and resources for the disassembly, reorganization, and reassembly of language... hopefully useful for writers and experimentalists who want to jumpstart their creativity, or otherwise wreck havoc upon an unsuspecting text."

WORD PLAY
"antagonyms"

The folks who put out the Oxford English Dictionary say the "usual name for a word with two opposing meanings is contranym," but admit "it is still not in sufficiently widespread use to have appeared in our dictionaries." Charles N. Ellis coined the word "antagonym" to describe the same, a single word that has meanings that contradict each other. I prefer his to the "usual" (but evidently not *that* usual) term. For instance, you can run fast (moving rapidly) or be stuck fast (fixed in position). Or be on an oversight (watchful control) committee that tries to find any oversight (something not noticed) that may have been made. You might overlook (ignore) important provisions if you do not have a lawyer overlook (pay attention to) your contract. Or an author's last (just prior) book might turn out to be his last (final) publication.

Ellis has quite a few examples on his antagonym page and explains the etymology of his word.

ROOTS
bride, bridal, bridegroom, bridesmaid, honeymoon

June has been a traditional month for weddings at least since the Roman era, so we thought we'd consider some bridal etymology starting with *bridal*. The word began as "bride-ale." The second oldest meaning of "ale" is "feast or celebration." Naturally, the drinking of ale (in its oldest sense) was a feature of such festivities, but a "bride-ale" was a wedding feast. Around the 14th century the word evolved to "bridal" and was used to mean all wedding proceedings, not just the party after. A couple of centuries later, "bridal" started to be used as a modifier (as in bridal bed, bridal cake, bridal chamber, etc.) The "-al" ending was identical to the endings of adjectives such as "natal" an "fatal," so "bridal" eventually lost its use as a noun as well as its inebriated meaning.

The root word *bride* may come from Old High German ("brut") that was the source of the medieval Latin ("bruta") and Old French ("bruy") words that had only the single sense of "daughter-in-law." "Newly-married woman" and "daughter-in-law" would have been synonymous in a society in which it was customary for the female spouse to live with her new husband's family. Along the same lines, some theorize the word's ultimate source was the Proto-Indo-European "*bru- " meaning "to cook, brew, make broth," which would have been a daughter-in-law's duty.

The word *bridegroom* is an example of folk etymology. (The term refers to a process that occurs when a word is "lost" or acquired from a foreign language and is then modified into something more familiar. In the 17th century, for instance, the Spanish word "cucaracha" was altered by English-speakers to become "cockroach.") According to etymologist John Ayto and others, before 1066 (the Old English era) the word was "bryd-guma": bryd=bride, guma=man. ("Guma" descended from the Latin "homo" [man].) By the 1200s, "guma" had disappeared as a stand-alone word and "bryd-guma" had survived as "bride-gome."

The word "groom," meaning "boy, lad, male servant" appeared, rather mysteriously, at about the same time. There are words with a superficial similarity in Old French and Old Norse, but they cannot be proven to be related. Whatever its source, "groom" became a common word while "gome" was rarely used, so "bridegome" became "bridegroom." ("Groom" did not become associated with taking care of horses until the 17th century.)

The first known instance of "bridesmaid" (as "bridemaid" with no "s") occurred in 1552. The phrase "often a bridesmaid but never a bride" was popularized by a Listerine mouthwash advertisement. Advertising man Gordon Seagrove and his collaborator, Milton Feasley, were called upon to deal with the delicate subject of "unpleasant breath" and developed an ad campaign that played on the fear of a bad social reaction to halitosis. The most successful of their ads concerned the "pathetic" case of "Edna," who was "often a bridesmaid but never a bride." Approaching her "tragic" thirtieth birthday and still unwed, poor Edna's bad breath -- a disorder that "you, yourself, rarely know when you have it. And even your closest friends won't tell you." - had prevented her nuptial joy. (Listerine sales went from $100,000 per year in 1921 to more than $4 million in 1927.)

Seagrove and Feasley probably were inspired by (or plagiarized from) a Victorian music hall song, Why Am I Always a Bridesmaid, written by Fred W. Leigh:
Why am I always a bridesmaid,
Never the blushing bride?
Ding! Dong! Wedding bells
Always ring for other gals.
But one fine day --
Please let it be soon -
I shall wake up in the morning
On my own honeymoon.

Although some dubious etymologies for "honeymoon" have popped up on the Internet the most plausible origin probably connects "honey" with "sweet." But the "moon" part probably doesn't connote a period of lunar time. Samuel Johnson felt "moon" really referred to the waxing and waning of the moon -- a marriage being full of sweet affection that naturally wanes over time. This is not as cynical as you might first think since the moon waxes again after it wanes.

PUNCTUATION POINTER
Academic Degrees

June is also a month for the granting of academic degrees. So, remember, terms such as "bachelor's degree" and "master's degree" are not capitalized in or sentences (or on resumes). The apostrophe precedes the "s" in these terms, showing possession. Names of majors are not capitalized unless they are proper nouns such as "Chinese" or "English."

(We mentioned punctuation because we were sure you would never make the faux pas of saying "someone graduated college." Sure, some folks accept "graduate from college," but *we* know the word's original sense was "to confer a degree upon" and thus you should use "one was graduated from college.")

QUOTATION: "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London

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