http://norman.walsh.name/2004/01/19/vocabulary 7 11 2004-01-19T06:19:00-05:00 $Date: 2005-09-11 10:27:02 -0400 (Sun, 11 Sep 2005) $ Norman Walsh 2004 Norman Walsh By now you must be getting “random word” spam too. John Maynard Keynes Words ought to be a little wild for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking. By now you must be getting “random word” spam too: Date: Several times a day From: "Some Poor Sod" <forged.address@example.org> Subject: Re: JEAMF, and began telling To: almost.everyone@example.org thug ashen tapis despoil hendrick littoral stark bingham bluestocking demise gin amanuensis dairylea roe viscoelastic catatonia evidential plenipotentiary counterproposal consecutive milwaukee It slips past the Baysian filters pretty well, but seems totally pointless. It doesn’t even contain any offers to enlarge my breasts or sell me prescription drugs at wholesale prices. [Update: in fact the message includes a (presumably malicious) attachment, but the MIME encoding is botched so I never see it. I don’t know if the botched encoding is nefarious or stupid, and I don’t care.] It’s just a heedless waste of bandwidth, I guess. I hope Dante carves out a new circle in hell for the folks that wreak this nonsense on us all. “Amanuensis,” in case you didn’t know, is a fancy word for someone who takes dictation or copies manuscripts. And by curious coincindence the word “plenipotentiary” turned up in a West Wing repeat just the other day. It means a person, especially a diplomat, with full authority to transact business.