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.

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.”

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. In practice, novelists—particularly those of 100 years ago—don’t use the same language patterns as present-day casual or business email writers, so I’m not sure it actually accomplishes anything. Maybe that’s why some of them use clips from UNIX software manuals and programming guides instead.

Since the quotes don’t turn up anywhere else, I suppose this means one of three things:

• Someone has transcribed parts of The Wheel of Time, and spambots have slurped up the transcription.
• Spammers are somehow extracting text from Google Books
• Spammers are manually going through books and scanning/transcribing them just to collect filler text.

Update: Found one in the spamtraps at work using a quote from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which at least showed up in a couple of pages with excepts.

And if the Dursleys were unhappy to have him back for the holidays, it was nothing to how Harry felt.

Whatever source they’re using, they’re definitely pulling stuff from multiple contemporary novels.

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 on Jackson herself. No one seems to remember that it was Justin Timberlake who ripped off part of her wardrobe.

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.

—

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.

I suppose “Convicted corrupt lobbyist” sounds too unwieldy… and there are people who might consider it redundant!

This should surprise no one, given that soccer (as we norteamericanos call what everyone else seems to refer to as football) isn’t terribly popular in the USA, with two notable exceptions: Parents of 6-year-olds who want to put their children into a sport, and the duration of the World Cup. El fútbol, however, is wildly popular in Europe and Latin America, and we have a lot of recent immigrants from Latin America.

So no, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that there are more Spanish-speaking hardcore soccer fans than English-speaking ones.

My first thought on seeing the subject was, “Well, it’s clearly not Dungeons and Dragons.” So I thought about other D&Ds, and the next thing I thought of was drag and drop. I knew that couldn’t be it, either. Who would hold a conference on drag-n-drop? (Now, I can see a D&D game dealing with a “dragon drop” contest, but that’s another issue entirely!)

I opened the newsletter, and of course it was a design and development conference. Should’ve been obvious, but I just didn’t think of it.

Any acronyms/abbreviations you’ve mixed up? Not just acronyms for which you know more than one meaning, but the ones that you’ve seen in one context, and the first meaning you thought of was from some other field entirely.

Yeah, right. Broadcast media is so locked down they can’t find that kind of language there.

When I was in middle school, I spent a week working at a cub scout day camp. I think I was around 12 or 13 at the time. The adults warned us that we had to watch our language around the cubs (who were probably around 8 or 9), because they didn’t want the kids picking up any bad words from us. They needn’t have bothered. The kids were far more foul-mouthed around us than we were amongst ourselves, and actually managed to shock us. This was in the late 1980s.

Kids don’t need TV or movies to learn bad words. They learn them from their friends at school, or they learn them from parents, or from neighbor kids.

There was a B.C. comic strip a few years ago that I thought illustrated this point well: Two kids (well, ants) walk into the room, one crying, “Mom, he said the Z-word!” The parents send the kid to his room, then have this brief conversation: “Where’d the little %@#&! learn the Z-word?” “Beats the #@*$ out of me.”

Then there was mahalo, Hawaiian for “thank you,” which is used everywhere in place of the English phrase. Either it’s part of the wave of Hawaiian identity, or it’s mandated by the Hawaii tourist board.

Aloha is all over the big island as well, but not quite to the same extent. We didn’t see a single “drive with aloha” sign this time around, for instance.

What we did see was kapu. Kapu is the Hawaiian form of taboo, a word which has lost much of its meaning both in modern English usage and in modern Hawaiian usage. In traditional polynesian cultures, a taboo was a sacred prohibition, and violation was often punishable by death (generally by way of being chosen for a human sacrifice). These days, kapu mainly shows up on “No Tresspassing” signs—of which there are plenty!