The spelling checker always suggests me that I should change "Emanuela'" by "Emasculate". Today for the first time I have seen the meaning ! I hate it!
Ciao ( or cicada, as it suggests)
Emanuela
My sympathies, emanuela, but don't let Aenigma [Aeolus] get to you. I'm sure this advice would be supported by my good friends tub, fishpond, bingo, wrangle, Capital Klan and awad(!).
Aside to jmh: Yours works well, Jo!
Here's a challenge. Let's turn our spell-checker into a feature rather than an object of derision.
Come up with a posting that makes sense as written but also as corrected by Aenigma. Marks for frequency of spelling substitution as well as pithy one-liners with cleverly-corrected keywords. Extra marks for humour. (Not a very precise definition of the rules, I know, but you would have stretched them anyway!)
>Aside to jmh: Yours works well, Jo
Your spell checked post is below.
jmh [Jo]
To which the only reply is WOW[wrangle]
Isn't it interesting, though, that the spell-checker for a board such as ours, which can be language-focussed on bad days, should perform even more abysmally than Micro$loth Word's? It's an [Aeoleus] to me, that's fur sure!
The monster is difficult to provoke, as I found to my disappointment, after several abortive attempts. Common names seem to be its favored diet. From Horace to Mephistopheles, form Chaplin to Carnegie, they are in there.
The monster is difficult to provoke...
Yes, I think my challenge is doomed. The timing wasn't great either, coinciding with a period of frenetic posting and pre-Christmas madness.
Perhaps we're best to enjoy the occasional serendipity of Aenigma's quirks. I thought its rendition of Faldage's "hiragana and katakana of Japanese" into Hiram and Kate was cute.
Oh, and Aenigma says to wish Merry Yagi to you all.
Dere's just one ting I don't unnerstand, if you don't mind my asking. Enigma it leaves untouched and Aenigma becomes Aeolus. Now dat I can understand 'cause my wife always used to tell me dat she tought dat I was a big inscootable (whatever dat means) bag o' wind. But what I don' unnerstand is how it turns Ænigma inta nihilism. Dat's what's really buggin me. No, no, you jus go back to talkin about langwidge, dat's OK, Don' mind me. I jus get ta wonderin about dese tings.
(Peter) Faldage Falk
It doesn't recognize the ae run together as a character in its alphabet, so what it sees is nigma, the next word in its list after that is nihilism.
>It doesn't recognize the ae run together as a character in its alphabet, so what it sees is nigma, the next word in its list after that is nihilism.
this, of course, is the logical answer. but in the world of enigma, this is the output of the floccinaucinihilipilification routine (run that through enigma once or twice).
Marty … You're challenge is not doomed but Aenigma is not easy to play with. It is very difficult to get something that makes sense both ways. So I settled for Aenigmatic sense and our nonsense, which in some parts makes gutter sense… but it was not something I could control ...
P.S. My respect for Aenigma now knows no bounds. This is my mad dance to its tune ..
Avy story of the Ululate genre (not) :
A Weltschmerz from Belm whose namaste was Schadenfreude swung her Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalophobia to N'est-ce pas's Ohrwurm merchant. They began to d'escalier in Mot juste : satyriasis and quietus activities. They had to indulge in dang, heck, and poot quite a few lives, during which they became tendentious. And despite disapproval of the Weltschmerz's patoot they ended up abecedrian. And lived happily ever after.
Avy, I don't know where you live, but in England in the 60s there was a "verbal art form" called "gobbledygook". I wouldn't swear to the spelling. Exponents could speak in a normal tone of voice, at a normal speed, using what on the surface sounded like normal syntax, but be saying nothing that made any sense. You heard it from time to time for a few years, then it just disappeared.
Your AEnigma output looks like gobbledygook. You may just have found the ultimate gobbledygook generator - 30 years too late!
Avy avers: Aenigma is not easy to play with
Except for the fact that Ænigma did not retain your possesive markers the output was definitely readable. To generate something with both readable output and readable input would be a serious challenge. I believe it would require a complete list of Ænigma's vocabulary. Does anyone know if such a thing is available?
and back in the early 80's, Scientific American -- then still a pretty good amateur science magazine, had a computer column.
One of the columns was devoted to writing in BASIC– a mock language generator.
the idea was we all –well make that most– sort of recognize a language– even if we can't read it.. French looks different than English, and Latin and Italian. Why?
The rule of each language where analyzed.. (All words in English must have a vowel– a, e,i,o,u are acceptable vowels.. We use th, ch, sh, ght, kn, sm, cl, and other letter combinations. But don't use ts (used in japanese and greek) or schl (except in names from German)– and we don't use cz (many slavic languages..) The average word in english is 6.x letter long, there are no two letter words with the letter u (but a, e, i and o work for two letter words, as does y. ) and sentences had on average 7 words– but could be as short as one... There were lots of rules.
once you had the rules, you could set up a random text generator–and make it follow all the rules.. about every third word was a real english word.. But it was non-sense.
the columnist actually gave the code for a basic program to generate "almost english", and gave some of the parameters for almost latin.. And almost french. I don't know if Scientific American has all of its archives available on its web page.. But I remember typing in the code and playing with program.
Capital K, I live in India. No. I had not heard about gobbledygook. It was interesting to know about it - thanks. Though I had read the word in teD's thread, didn't know what it was about,entirely.
There was a radio comedian, in the '70s, by the name of Stanley Unwin (who took the title Professor - although this was utterley self-awarded) who used to do five or six minute sketches entirely in gobbledegook. I have to say I didn't admire him, but he had quite a cult following.
Thanks Rhub - I had forgotten the name. I tend to agree that gobbledegook of itself was pretty useless. What I admired was someone's ability to actually spout it and sound perfectly reasonable at the same time.
However, I much prefer the Sir Humphrey Appleby approach to speaking at length without actually saying anything at all ...
It is, of course, a required skill for all politicians. and not just parliamentary ones. Have you ever heard the General Secretary of a Union explaining why the executive are calling off a strike?