polyglot conspiracy

#4:

I feel so great because I finally understand S&M now.

-Said by a classmate in discussing the article “No” by Don Kulick (2003: Language & Communication 23, 139-151)

Here’s a modern mystery that’s been on my mind for a while. I’ve noticed that a disproportionate amount of the spam I get to my crappEmail account contains the phrase “James Taz” somewhere within the subject line. Not the sender name or address, just the subject line. It doesn’t matter what the spam is for; it’s there about half of the time. As in these subject lines to the first four messages I had when I just opened my account for the day:

PaydayLoanServiceWiredToYou-In24hrs James Taz appealing

Get Your FREE* Walt Disney World® Family Vacation Package! James Taz

WeCanQuicklyRestoreYourCreditRating James Taz 11:16:19 PM

e-Commerce website at NO cost to you James Taz divine

Now. I don’t know much about the mechanics of spam, but I am not sure a) what the purpose is of sticking a name in so bizarrely and so frequently, and b) why “James Taz”? Who is James Taz? Does he really exist? Is he a spammer? Is he a SpamMaster? A convenient alterego pseudonym for spammers?

Google doesn’t come up with any apparent leads. First of all, I’m surprised that googling ["James Taz" spam] comes up with one wayward hit that only formally contains the phrase “James Taz”: the message board poster didn’t use a comma in between the two names “James” and “Taz.” I’m surprised because if I get this much spam mentioning Mr. Taz, it seems that other people must as well. Have you ever gotten anything from/to the Tazman?

There’re also a lot of tie sales pages that come up on the search for “James Taz”: there’s a tiemaker called Benjamin James and a type of tie called Taz Devil ___ (there are a few variations on this), so the hits read “BENJAMIN JAMES Taz Devil ____.” Nope.

The other James Tazs (Tazes? Taz? Taz’s?) seem to be real people. There’s one who I’m inferring is deceased (DOB/DOD not listed, but his wife is listed as DOB 1800s), a James Taz Green located through a British genealogy website. There is a James Taz on Myspace, and he appears to be an 18-year-old pothead. And there’s James Taz Gerstman, an electrical engineering technician. I don’t think it’s any of these people.

So how does a name like this become the name that spammers use? Please, help me solve this mystery. It might be bigger than the Nigerian money transfer scam.

UPDATE: I’m going to keep adding new James Taz subject lines as they come to me. Here’s one:

James Taz Treat your pet to a shopping spree hamperingclassy

James Taz WireMoneyToYourAccountToday Upset

We’reGiving Away a$10,000 Scholarship James Taz …refined

Get your FREE* Ultimate Toothbrush- Crest Sonicare James Taz charming

GetFREE-Ringtones for Your CellPhone James Taz handsome

Prepared for James Taz

Re: Problems James Taz

The current issue of Speculative Grammarian is the much-needed FEMA Appreciation Issue. It includes amusing gems such as “How to Get a PhD Without Really Trying,” where good advice is given regarding subfields of linguistics:

In linguistics, say (picking a completely random example), phonology and syntax are at the top of the ivory tower. This is because they have more theoretical infrastructure, i.e. notation; and because phonology is grounded in observable and indisputable phonetic fact, while syntacticians control the world supply of asterisks.

On the other hand, sociolinguistics and discourse pragmatics occupy the ivory sewer. These disciplines (to use the word as loosely as they use all terminology) constitute what has been called “the soft underbelly of linguistics”—this in a field not noted for its overall muscle definition. Even to other linguists, sociolinguists are hard put to demonstrate that their subject matter really exists; and there isn’t even a word for people who specialize in discourse pragmatics.

Seriously, it’s real funny. I also recommend “The Assumption of Slang”:

Rather than provide the obvious straightforward sociolinguistic analysis of [slang], I propose to address a more fundamental need in linguistics: despite decades of work on the problem, linguistics still isn’t cool.

The solution? Create our own jargon. Being linguists, we can accelerate the natural process, and create group-defining, storied jargon in an afternoon…

Suggestions include ‘phone, morpeme, and ði. Su-weet.

You, too, can join the exciting world of Satirical Linguistics by submitting to SpecGram. I hear it’s a great way to avoid grading papers…

If only I had cable, I’d become a Colbert Report junkie. According to Language Log, last week’s debut started off with a linguistic bang, with a segment called The Word - it’s his answer to O’Lielly, er, O’Reilly’s Talking Points Memo. (Watch video here, via Crooks and Liars.)

And on this show, on this show your voice will be heard… in the form of my voice. ‘Cause you’re looking at a straight-shooter, America. I tell it like it is. I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em. I will speak to you in plain simple English.

And that brings us to tonight’s word: truthiness.

Now I’m sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster’s, are gonna say, “Hey, that’s not a word.” Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true, or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.

Comedians still kicking politicians’ asses on that whole “thinking” thing…

Courtesy of Mark Singer’s piece in The New Yorker comes Harriet Miers’s Blog!!! It’s truly remarkable - complete with punctuation errors, contact information, and hot-button issue posts. Singer carried on an IM conversation with the pseudonymous blogger behind the blog:

TOTT: We read in the Times a story about your note to G.W.B. in 1997: “Hopefully Jenna and Barbara recognize that their parents are ‘cool’—as do the rest of us.” . . . What was that all about?

Dallasharriet44: George and Laura . . . well, basically they’re really cool but their daughters don’t know it!! I mean, they have figured it out since 2000, but back then they were Too Cool for School and way too cool for mom and dad. You know that age. If you think J&B are party animals, you should hear some of the stories about G&L . . . not from recently, of course.

TOTT: Not being judgmental or anything, just objective, the way all reporters should be, how would you be in a position to define or recognize “cool”?

Dallasharriet44: Well, you don’t know all the sides of Miss Harriet Ellan Miers!!

TOTT: This appeared in a Times editorial: “Ms. Miers’s record is so thin that no one seems to have any idea of what she believes, and she was clearly chosen because of her close ties to the President, not her legal qualifications.” Care to comment?

Dallasharriet44: Well, did the New York Times pick me? Or did the President of the Entire Country, who DOES know all my qualifications?

What’s interesting about this (other than the fact that THE NEW YORKER PRINTED AN IM INTERVIEW WITH A BLOGGER) is that the article gives away the real IM address of the blogger (or, at least the IM address s/he uses in connection with his/her persona as Miers!!!). And this, the blogger mentions, is sort of “annoying.” I was shocked (not an overstatement) that the real IM name was printed, and I wonder if there was discussion about appropriateness of doing so or not. I mean, printing an IM name is really like printing a phone number - opening you up to contact by anyone reading. If this is the screen name the person uses for non-Miers-related business, that’s sort of a breach of very personal information. Yes?

Also, a part of me wonders how this faux blog would be different if the candidate were equally as unqualified for the Supreme Court, only male. Less exclamation marks? Definitely not pink. Fewer abbreviations? Less W-worship? Would it even exist?

Not for Britain, it seems. The BBC has launched a grammar jackal campaign concerned with the English represented in children’s television, according to The Times.

The corporation’s governors have cautioned that slang and poor language employed by the corporation’s stars could create a generation of children unable to master English.
…
Minutes of the BBC Board of Governors’ July meeting, released yesterday, disclose that Alison Sharman, Controller of the CBBC channel, has promised to make “keeping a close watch on the use of bad grammar so as not to undermine standards of English” a priority.

She was responding to a Government-commissioned report by Professor Patrick Barwise, of the London Business School, which criticised the “crass” presentation, “tastelessness and cruelty” of some programmes on the CBBC channel. While praising many programmes, the report criticised the frequent use of bad grammar, citing “ain’t” and “you was” as examples.

Oh, goodness. The discussion centers on the children’s show Dick & Dom, whose website includes a fun trip to the toilet of “da bungalow” where the characters live (I don’t know anything else about this show). Judging just from this, it seems if there’s anything “tasteless” about the show it’s not in the language; it’s in the poo and snot jokes. But apparently the trouble with speech is:

Joyce Watts, a retired teacher, complained of “fast, loud speech” where “all the words run into one and cannot be understood”. Ms Watts said interviewers would ask guests, “What d’ya like best” and, “What’s ya faverit number?” Children’s written work suffered as they began to spell words as they believed they should be pronounced.

Hey, we’ve seen similar accounts before, but blamed on something else. As in, “My students write LOL and smilies on their research papers.” There is luckily a voice of reason here, though she goes virtually undiscussed the rest of the article:

But Julia Strong, of the National Literacy Trust, believes that there is no going back to Listen With Mother. She said: “Children won’t watch if television is too stiff and formal. The important thing is that they know when to shift from the casual language of the playground to a more grammatically correct tone.”

So there’re a few things going on here. One is, is it TV’s responsibility to set a “good example” for kids’ grammar? Two is, is saying “ain’t” really so bad? Three is, STOP TRYING TO CONTROL THE ‘STANDARDS’ OF LANGUAGE WHEN MOST OF WHAT YOU THINK IS ‘BAD’ IS REALLY JUST IDIOMATIC.

Phew.

[Found via A Capital Idea, where you can witness the blog's author making a good point about the Brits just not wanting their kids to sound American, and then commenters saying that Americans aren't such a good example, anyway, of grammatical "correctness." Eh.]

There’s been an onslaught of crazy spam lately, so if you’ve made a comment that seems not to have been approved, it’s likely because I had so many spam comments that I just couldn’t pick out the real ones. I put in some new blacklist words, so I hope this helps quell the fire for now…but you should post your comment again, if it got lost, so it can get found and seen.

Also, do spammers respond heavily to posts about Scrabble, or something? Because that’s when they all appeared.

I finally watched last year’s Word Wars: Tiles and Tribulations on the Scrabble Circuit last night, after it’d been sitting on my Netflix pile for a month or so. It’s a nice little film about champion Scrabble players, not unlike 2002’s Spellbound. (You can watch clips here.) Aside from the crappy soundtrack (I’m sorry, but it is crappy), it’s full of delightful anecdotes and anagrams, and more than a handful of things that make you go hmmm….For starters, it presents a kind of desperate look at the life of the four men they follow to the championships: these guys have no “real life” outside of Scrabble and admit to it; their obsession is truly, truly an obsession.

So it’s actually kind of sad to watch at times, as the geeky guys pore over lists of words and talk about how broke they are because the only thing they ever do is play Scrabble, which, btw, is not a very lucrative sport. There is entertainment, though. For one, the characters on the Washington Square Park circuit are colorful and seem to be a little more attached to the world than do the champion tournament players, offering a different perspective on the game.

For another, Marlon Hill, one of the featured players in the documentary, says some hilarious shit. Now I know it’s cliche to think that the one black guy in the movie is just soooo funny, but he also says some interesting things about language that made me think of every sociolinguistics class I’ve taken: that a language has the characteristics of the people who speak it, for instance. Or my favorite:

English is a fucked up language; too many words have multiple meanings, y’know…Motherfucker’n go crazy dealin’ with this shit.

Speaking of profanity, did you know that jew as a verb used to be in the Scrabble dictionary but was taken out due to controversy? Due to this and other arguable obscenities, now there’s a regular Scrabble player’s dictionary, as well as a “family” version.

Another disturbance was to learn that some people (ok, Joe Edley, a former champ) actually study word lists while driving to and from work. Did you hear that? He studies. Word lists. While driving. This has got to be more distracting than cell phone use.

Finally, we come to the part that struck me most from the very beginning: there are virtually no women in this documentary. The characters we follow are four men, and most of the other players interviewed or shown are likewise male. There are a couple of champion players interviewed, and what do they get to talk about it? The lack of women at Scrabble champion tournaments. In fact, according to them, there have never been more than SIX women in the top 50 players at the national tournament. SIX out of FIFTY! I feel like this ratio is totally absurd, and I want an explanation. The women in the film say that women simply aren’t as obsessive as men about things they like to do; moreoever, women have obligations in life that keep them from dedicating themselves to something like Scrabble. I don’t know - what do y’all think? Are there other reasons there might be so few women in this game at the top levels? (It can’t be biological, right? It doesn’t seem that the skills involved in Scrabble are ones to be sex-differentiated.)

I was going to write about how today I noticed for the first time that H.C. is an acronym for “handicapped,” which I think is weird. But I just stumbled across the Acronym Finder, which is far more interesting and likely to cause wastings of time. This site will find you acronyms for almost anything. But not some combinations of letters which I tried. See the end of this post for the implications of this finding.

It gives me 98 (98?!) words/phrases that the letters H.C. are an acronym for. Including:

Hydrocyclone
Hague Convention
Haley’s Comet
Hand Cancel
Handicap/Handicapped
Handling Capacity
Hannibal Connecting Railroad
Happy Couple
Hard Computing
Hazard Category
Head Circumference (?. !.)
Helicopter Combat Support Squadron
Heritage Christian (High School)
Hiwassee College (Madisonville, TN)
Hog Cholera (classical swine fever)

Nice. So, be careful what you acronym - there’s almost certainly confusion to be had.

Also try Acronym Attic, containing acronyms that aren’t vetted by humans.

Because no humans have reviewed this content, it is possible you may find incorrect, inappropriate, unsuitable, duplicate, or offensive content among these definitions. If this is a problem, we suggest you use only Acronym Finder.

Hmm. Currently formulating a drinking game involving Acronym Attic…

Especially British ones, where they’re only single quotes. [What? That makes no sense. You are batty. -PC] From the Guardian, via LowCulture: