Having gotten a humorous wrong-word error in a text message spelled out with a cellular phone number pad, I started to wonder about collisions of this sort in general.  What keystrokes match the most words?

Well, I turned to my trusty bigwordlist.txt, a big dictionary file I pieced together from multiple places, particularly orchy, and I wrote a Perl script to look at it.

If a phone were to have this dictionary (there are a lot of reasons it shouldn’t, mostly because a lot of the words are of much lower frequency than others) there would be more than 20,000 collisions — places where the phone would have to guess, whether by a stupid algorithm (”pick the lowest alphabetically”, say) or something more sophisticated (”rank by frequency of occurrence in the wild”) or something very sophisticated that took grammar into account.

Here are some facts I found:

* The most troublesome sequence is 2666.  That can stand for ammo, amon, anno, anon, bonn, bono, boom, boon, cmon, comm, como, comp, conn, coom, coon, or coop (16 possibilities).
* The most collisions for two-, three-, and five-letter words are for 66, 466, and 46637 with 13 possibilities each (that “66″ — “[mno][mno]” — shows up a lot, yes?)
* My mom’s allergic to shrimp, so would that make them a “non-mom-nom”?  Spell it out.
* A lot of long medical words collide, because the ending “-ia” is the same as “-ic” in T9 (”hypercholesterolemia”, “hypercholesterolemic”).  Below that, “-ser” and “-ses” and “-zer” and “-zes” in verbs cause a lot of collisions.  The longest not-trivial pair looks to be “unreasonableness” and “unseasonableness” at 16 letters, but I’m not sure those are standard usages.
* Any requests for more info?  Raw files?

I almost always watch DVDs with French subtitles on.  It helps a lot with colloquial phrases that I have not otherwise found a way to learn.  I read French much, much better than I can understand spoken French, though.  I can manage sometimes, especially if it’s educated, Parisian French, but even that’s about 60-70%.  A film like Chrysalis is something that is extremely annoying because I can almost understand it without English subtitles.  But — and this baffles me — having a French film playing with English subtitles seemingly does nothing to help me learn.  So this reminds me of … R2-D2.

The premise for the character of R2-D2 is of a robot that can understand spoken English perfectly but cannot generate it.  And the language in which he speaks to C3-PO seems woefully insufficient to communicate the complexity of the thoughts that are supposedly being transmitted, unless there is some weird tonal stuff going on that, like Mandarin, is completely inaudible to me.  (That was a joke.)  Even in the 1970s, I expect that tech-minded people would have been sophisticated enough to understand that they had this backwards.  But even that is comparing just a speech recognition program to a TTS.  The idea that a little robot can understand spoken language in an NLP way, with perfect comprehension, but no one could be bothered to give him a better synthesizer?  It’s like Noonian Soong getting everything perfect in an android except for skin tone.

𝌐 mcgees.org has had mega-fun with automatic translators; first Babelfish with holiday cheer, then (unsolved) puzzles with Google Translate.

Now here comes translationparty.com, doing one thing and doing it well: in and out of Japanese (always a fun language for translators) until equilibrium is reached.

I was ecstatic when I found a stable oscillator (order 2), but it turns out those are quite common (even if the site doesn’t recognize that it’s stable at order > 1.)  Then I found an order 4!  A→B→C→D→A.  Here it is, with thanks to Eddie Izzard.

OK!  Beat that!  Game on!

(No one is going to play, is he?  Then I will be very   )

I need to convince myself — again — to stop following links further and further into the bowels of Wikipedia.  But: Yorkshire Dialect and Accent:

One of the closest differences in dialect in the area is between the West of the City of Wakefield (such as Ossett, Wakefield and Horbury) compared with the East (eg. Castleford, Pontefract and Featherstone), areas less than 3 miles apart

What?  Three miles?

I know I’m Californian.  Anglos have had a strong presence in the area for about a century and a half, and not far before the arrival of the Trans-Continental Railroad.  Railroads, I would expect, smooth regional accents.  Mass media, more so — and California, having Hollywood and early television and radio studios, essentially created the more-or-less-standard U.S. accent.  So, bearing that in mind: three miles?  Weren’t people walking in those days?

This kind of fine-grained distinction in accents — and I’m most familiar with the phenomenon in Britain — suggest a kind of dialectal inertia that is baffling to me.  I understand that towns had hundreds of years to develop their accents in isolation, but the fact that so many are preserved into the 21st century, though modified — and just how geographically close-by some distinct accents are — still surprises me.  I imagine that there must be some in-group/out-group identification going on.  British humor seems frequently to revolve around accent — Python, for instance, Wallace and Gromit, and Neil Morrissey’s character on Men Behaving Badly come to mind — and much of that I understand only at an intellectual level, and I presume I still miss most of it.  The Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine film Sleuth (if you haven’t seen it, don’t Google, don’t read the description, just watch it) uses accent for a pointed social commentary, and I entirely missed that when I first saw it.

A book I once read — I’m pretty sure it was Jane Walmesley’s Brit-Think, Ameri-Think — talked about the experience of young British women coming to America and being told their accent was “beautiful, even if they were from Liverpool or Birmingham” (I think that’s exact, but I’ll have to wait for the maturation of Google Books to be sure.)  The book, by the way, is constantly hilarious, maybe never more so than in the dedication of the book to the author’s daughter, child of an American and a Briton, who reportedly describes herself as “half and hahff”.

The title of this post references the seminal Homicide: Life on the Street episode Three Men and Adena, in which “the arabber” tell the detectives that if they say the name of the city — “Baltimore” — that he could tell each of them what street he (the detective) grew up on.  The difference, by the way, frequently seemed to me to be the length of the “ah” in “Bahll-mər”.  This suggests that the phenomenon I’ve described is not unheard of in this country, but I’m just citing television at this point.  More erudite commentary is courted.

I’m going to put the blame for much bloodshed squarely on the shoulders of Google Translate.  Like this [imaginary -ed.]  story that came out a couple of days ago, about the U.S. (arrogant unwashed bastards!) trying to impose Jeffersonian Enlightenment ideals on the Middle East.  The U.S. reflects:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The U.S. tells this to Israel …

אנחנו מחזיקים אמיתות אלה להיות מובן מאליו, שכל בני האדם נוצרו שווים, שהם ניחנו ידי בוראם זכויות מסוימות צאן ברזל, כי בקרב אלה לחיים, לחירות את המרדף אחרי האושר.

… who tell it to the Palestinians …

ونحن نحمل هذه الحقائق لتكون بديهية ، أن جميع الناس خلقوا متساوين ، وأنهم هبوا من خالقهم بعض الحقوق الحديد الأغنام ، أنه من بين هذه الحياة والحرية والسعي لتحقيق السعادة.

… and the Palestinians tell the U.S. what Israel told them:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain rights, iron sheep, that among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Palestinians ask the U.S., “What the hell is with the iron sheep?  Are they saying we are iron sheep?  That we all have the right to iron sheep?  More likely, that only Israel has the right to iron sheep, no?!  That’s just like them!”

So the U.S. mediators try to calm them down.  They tell the Palestinians what they told Israel in the first place, and note that there’s nothing there about sheep at all …

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

… so the Palestinians say to the Israelis, “You idiots, what they said was this!”

ونحن نحمل هذه الحقائق لتكون بديهية ، أن جميع الناس خلقوا متساوين ، وأنهم هبوا من خالقهم بحقوق معينة غير قابلة للتصرف ، أنه من بين هذه هي الحياة والحرية والسعي لتحقيق السعادة.

The Israelis take it and mull it over …

אנחנו מחזיקים אמיתות אלה להיות מובן מאליו, שכל בני האדם נוצרו שווים, וכי הם ניחנו לפי עם בוראם זכויות מסוימות הן צאן ברזל, כי בקרב אלה הם החיים, החירות את המרדף אחרי האושר.

… then return to the U.S. and accuse them of telling the Palestinians:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain rights, iron sheep, that among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“Is that true?” they say.  “Did you really call the Palestinians iron sheep?  ‘Cos we think that’s pretty cool.  They’re obstinate, hard to move, and are as dumb as ingots of steel.”  Then they think for a second and say, “Wait, did you bring up the iron sheep to them at all?  It looks like they’re calling us iron sheep!  What the hell?  This is supposed to be a peace process!  I’ll show you ‘iron sheep’, you

בני זונות

The Palestinians respond, “No it’s you who are the

اولاد القحبة

And the U.S. negotiator says, “See how McGee had to give the insults their own lines because there’s a switch from LtR to RtL reading order?  That’s some common ground for y’all to start from, isn’t it?  That y’alls write backwards?  In our opinion, the whole sorry lot of you are iron sheep, fuckers who can’t all but never write youze sentences in the right erection!”

Then both sides — separately — tell the U.S. that there was nothing precluding them from denying the other side rights, so what is the fuss about.  And the U.S. says, “It’s right there: inalienable!”  And the two parties (who aren’t talking to each other any-more-so-there) say “The word is unalienable, you twit, and the other side kinda deleted that sentiment.  If they are willing to alien our rights, we can alien right back.”

The U.S. negotiator goes back to requisition an unabridged dictionary to find out whether it is “inalienable” or “unalienable”, and, oh yeah, what does that mean?

Then there is much cursing, gnashing of teeth, a small amount of white phosphorus, and a smaller amount of white erudition.  And in the resulting confusion, no one bothers to tell the U.S. to leave because they aren’t helping.

The world’s come a long way in the ten years since The Most Narcotic Period of Anniversary.  Now we’ve got Google.  And now we have many more languages.  So, read that link for the methodology; basically, it’s playing “Chinese Whispers” (”Telephone”) with Google Translate.  Here it is, flip-flopping with English all the way, alphabetically by language (i.e., English→Afrikaans→English→Albanian→English→…)

I’ve chosen a strong pair of sentences, very recognizable (I promise), each containing what I thought was one universally immutable noun.  But that wasn’t the case.

Sweet voice and Amazing life experience!  But I mention it Clearly.  Now I know.

And here it is chained (i.e., English→Afrikaans→Albanian→Arabic→…, starting and stopping with English but skipping it in the “E”s section.)

Only on the life of a line, said the widow; The good Intention, but I understand now that loss.

What this suggests to me is that Google is not using — at least universally — some kind of internal hyper-Esperanto; if the sentences were being abstracted to a(n ultra-cool) meta-language, these two modes would yield similar results, and they are not even close.  But they’re doing something else, apparently, which seems to involve remembering the outbound translation for the inbound return.  But I’m not willing to wager anything on that hypothesis.

So the battle of wits has begun.  What was the original text?  It ends when we discover who is right, and what quote he will secretly submit to me for the next round.  Post answers below.  Also, for bonus points (the normal mcgees.org prize is a banana through the mail), I want critical interpretation of those lines — the author was cryptic, but what was he trying to say?

(I thought about “Google Torture Porn” for a title, but thought that was in rather poor taste.)

I thought I’d excerpt a joke from an upcoming post — patience, flock — remembering a “Partnership for a Drug-Free America” TV agitprop spot from when I was in high school.  Over some hellish black-and-white scenes, the sad voice intones, “Nobody ever says, ‘I want to be a junkie when I grow up.’”

And my response was, “Well, I believe you just did.”

Please someone get the joke in the post title.  That’s even more important than telling me how many times you can say “agitprop spot” without getting tongue-tied (I’m at “one”.  At one with the that’s basically the joke in the title….)

Funny enough for a FPP, maybe:

I berated Ed Vedder for not using the subjunctive in the song Wishlist.  But every time I get self-righteous about the decline of the subjunctive mood, I consider these two sentences:

I see someone drowning and shout “He will die and no one shall save him!”

I am drowning and shout “I will die and no one shall save me!”

The former means “It is inevitable that he will die, and I am therefore distraught.”  The latter means “I insist that you allow me to die!”  And when you start to explain why the fuck that is, you start composing sentences like “Would and should are used in the same way as other preterite modal verbs in the apodosis clause when the conditional mood is being used”, and then it becomes a contest to see who should hit you with a brick, and who will.

Where oh where do I tweet a cleverwhittled140 to say that Twitter is down?  Here?  Ha!  I get 14 more characters starting NOW:

It is rapidly becoming apparent that the surname “McGee” has achieved a definable meaning in colloquial English, as a post-modifier.  I, Joshua McGee (recreational lexicographer; possessor of the surname “McGee” since 1978; and owner/maintainer/founder [1999 - present] of mcgees.org [website and related merchandising] wherein the token “McGee” appears several sigma beyond its incidence in the average website), assert that I am a competent authority on the usage of “McGee”.  I offer the following:

The construction is “Noun/Adjective McGee”, where Noun/Adjective is capitalized to construct a standard Western two-token name, fancifully consisting of a putative “given” name and the “surname” McGee.  In such contexts, the resulting name is applied to an individual, and the meaning is roughly “epitomizing noun/adjective in an unflattering manner”, or the closely-related “tending to be identified or recognized as noun/adjective to such a degree that nothing else is apparent or relevant.”

Examples:

1. Tits McGee: “A nickname for a woman with good sized boobs.” (appears in Urban Dictionary [retrieved 2009]; similar colloquial usage in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy [film] [released 2004])
2. Spandex McGee: (presum.) “A woman who wears a large amount of the fabric Spandex unflatteringly” (appears in Twitter [website], user overfab [posted 2009])
3. Fatass McGee (uncapitalized in original): (presum.) “An extremely obese individual / An individual about whom only obesity is noticed” (appears in Twitter [website], user theazn1 [posted 2009])

It should be noted that:

1. the use of “Fatty McGee” as a generic term for an individual presumably meeting certain (currently unknown) characteristics in the work of monologist and comedian Jon Stewart (b. 1969) is incompletely understood, and is deserving (in this editor’s opinion) of further study, and that
2. reverse application of this construction to the fictional character “Fibber McGee” in Fibber McGee and Molly [radio and (later) television program airing prior to 1961] resulting in the assumption that the character was so named because he “prevaricates to an unseemly degree” or “prevaricates in such a fashion that little else is noticed”, seems, at present, unwarranted

I just got a BBC Audio book, through PaperBackSwap, that is label(l)ed “Complete & Unabridged”.

I can think of numerous poems, symphonia, etc., that could be listed as “Incomplete but Unabridged”.  The X-Files episode Redrum and the film Ronin, if their closing voice-overs were removed, could be considered “Complete but Abridged”.

I am hereby amused by the phrase, though, and your contributions are courted.

Joshua: “Mom, do you mind if I link my cell phone to your laptop for a sec?”

My Mom: “Why would I care?”

J: “Sorry.  Just thought I should ask first.”

MM: “No, seriously.  Why would I care?  Is it going to cost me money?  Slow down my computer?  Break something?”

J: “Oh.  No.”

MM: “Go ahead.”

(Note to self: take laptop with you everywhere.)

Q: “…  The border can be either of the same color or shaded.”

A: “… look at using -fuzz and -trim”

I’m doing this post without Web searches to help my point, namely, that when one gets 95%+ of one’s news from NPR, not only does one get a skewed selection of stories (I saw a checkstand tabloid and asked my mother “Is Patrick Swayze really dying?”), one never knows how to spell anything.  If I had ever read a story about the man, I might have a vague clue of how to spell the Iranian president’s name.  I think I could utter (the American pronunciation of) the syllables, and I bet it starts with an ‘A’, but even that is a guess.

Sometimes, though, the misconceptions can be more fundamental.  Consider the proposed environmental regulation that I kept hearing as cap in trade.  This made no sense to me, if for no other reason than that politicians are rarely so forthright about the negative consequences of policies.  Toying briefly with Cap’n Trade — presumably a lovable mercantile sailor with a cool hat — I saw on a blog today cap-and-trade.  Oh.  So, that’s like, “An upper limit on allowable discharge of pollutants by corporations, a market in which unused allowances can be auctioned, and a catchy three-short-word moniker”?  That would make sense.  I suppose a quick Wikipedia search would clear that up, but, again: that’s my point.

Do there exist words for the following?

1. An emotion that can only be accurately described by nonverbal expressions
2. Beauty of a type or degree that makes the viewer uncomfortable
3. Two people close enough in age that they could not be siblings (and far enough separated in age that they could not be twins)
4. The position of honor in film actor billings in which they state, at the end of the list of stars, “with foo and bar“

Real words only, please.  I’m not looking to play e-Sniglets

Highly recommended:  The Have a Word For It by Howard Rheingold (not in print?) and:

Unread (if someone wants to buy me the Kindle edition, LMK; I’ve sent the sample to Cabin Small):

OK, fine, since people are going to post smartass answers anyway, I might as well pretend I courted them

Worst.  Definition.  Ever.

assignation, sense 2, The New Oxford American Dictionary: the allocation or attribution of someone or something as belonging to something.

I believe that I have been reading too much dialogue between kittehs: when I saw the URL for the (sublime) doihaveswineflu.org, I pictured a photo of a hung-over-looking tabby asking “Do I haves wine flu?”

“Supreme Court Ruling a Crock of Shit”.

via The Center for Inquiry’s Twitter feed, found when they started following me.  What the hell?  I know I’m cool and all, but how did I get the CFI to care about my tweets?

… is small enough that one may safely round it to zero  –Bob Mike

I’ll just come out and say it: I really like Spider Robinson.  Misogynist, yes, but wonderful.  As in what?  Well, dedicating a book about a brothel to Heinlein and wishing that all prostitutes — “artists” — had a place as wonderful to practice their art as his fictional parlor.

But as embarrassed as I am to mention the book, and mortified that it will seem I’m recommending it, I have to quote a couple of lines:

[I]f there is any way that you can arrange your affairs so as to avoid dropping into whorehouse garbage from a great height, naked in February, then that is almost certainly the course your life should take.

and

A command is really just a request you don’t bother to phrase politely.

Dam furners.  Lettem in and soon theyll be corupting our spellling ‘n uzing punctwation marks insted of wurds:

“The immigration issue has touched every corner of society over the past two decades in some way, and this particular segment features experts’ commentary about immigration’s affect on critical issue facing the country … With our economy struggling, border violence reaching a tipping point & our natural resources beginning to dwindle the immigration issue is too important to our society to be ignored!” — The Federation for American Immigration Reform

During the campaign, BBC anchors were pronouncing candidate Obama’s name as “barrack OH-bahmah”.  Fun.  They’ve fixed this.  They now pronounce his name as “Buh-RACK a bomber”.  Yes, not “RAHCK”, “RACK”.  In RP, foreign words, presumably to sound more foreign, have a phonemes pronounced with North American short a — as in Rack.  In educated NA pronunciation, presumably to sound more foreign, foreign words are pronounced with ahs — as in Rock.  Listen to the BBC and NPR and compare the pronunciations of Iraq.

Of course, in RP, “Obama” does not sound like “a bomber”.  That would be silly.  To say “Obama”, you end it with an “r” sound.  To say “a bomber”, you end it with an “a” sound.  Of course.  It is only we silly North Americans (and only in something like “NA RP”) who pronounce present rs and don’t pronounce absent rs. Of course.

I hope my trans-Atlantic colleagues will forgive me when I note that anglophilia will get you so far, then it will get you killed

Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, it looks like we’ve lost some irregular conjugations of “to thrive”.  Whereas I would say “The economy throve on foo, and has thriven on bar ever since”, educated people, including plenty of analysts on NPR, are saying “The economy thrived on foo, and has thrived on bar ever since.”

Linguists are well past being prescriptive, and are now descriptive, grammarians, bestselling books be damned.  And many of my word choices are affectations, or at least began as such — using constructions such as these are they more or less self-consciously.  But this isn’t one of those.  It’s not even a wincer, like “heighth” is.  It is simply as natively jarring to my ear as “He goed to the store one day, and has goed every day since.”  OK, so, fine, do away with irregular verbs — it makes English far easier for learners, and who gives a whit about Old Norse — but, real question, when did we lose the past conjugation and past participle of to thrive, if indeed we have?

Paging Jordon.

Too precious not to quote:

don’t give your info to scam/phishing sites. these are generally easy to spot if you’re not cognitively impaired, like many American’s

(I was going to begin this post “O quantumcipher!  Although you are not here with us today, …” but I didn’t think that was funny enough.)

The Independent:

United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 … was passed in November 1967, after Israel had occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai and Golan, and it emphasizes “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict”.

Readers who know the problem here will be joined by those who will immediately pick it up. The Israelis say that they are not required to withdraw from all the territories — because the word “all” is missing and since the definite article “the” is missing before the word “territories”, its up to Israel to decide which bits of the occupied territories it gives up and which bits it keeps.

In related news, I was just given a parking ticket!  Can you believe it?  Yes, there was a sign that said “No parking”, but I told the cop that I didn’t park there on Wednesdays or Thursdays!  Just Saturday!  When I was not parking on Wednesdays, I was indeed not parking!

Egads.

A perennial favorite on mcgees.org, almost as long as there has been a mcgees.org, is the mangling of Christmas carols and poetry by taking them through translation paths in Babelfish.  In this stretch of time, automatic translation technology has progressed to the point at which it’s not really funny any longer.  Here is the traditional Narcotic Period path for “Twas the Night Before Christmas”, this time using the fantastic Google Translate:

“That was on Christmas Eve, when the entire house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

Stockings were hung by the chimney with care
In the hope that Saint – Nicholas soon would be there;

The children were all located in drag their beds,
While visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads;
Mother and her kerchief and I in my cap
Recently installed for a long winter nap,
If the lawn, as a tire noise,
I jumped out of bed to see what is wrong.
Through the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw the chassis.
The moon within the snow
He gave the brightness of midday to objects below,
If my eyes should appear,

But a miniature sleigh and eight reindeer,
With some “old driver so lively and quick,
I knew that at one time must Saint – Nick.
More than eagles his courses came Jenny,
He whistles and shouted and called them by name;
“Now, Nob! Now, dancer! Now Prance and Vixen!
On, Comet! on Cupid! And Blitzer!
For the upper balcony! at the top of the wall!
Well, the difference Dash! Dash away! Dash away all! ”
As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly,
If it is an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So, for that high-flying home courses,
With the sleigh full of toys, and Saint – Nicholas too.

And then in a twinkling I heard on the roof
Pawing rampant and in every small town.
Since I drew my hand and became,
The chimney Saint Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur from head to toe in
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A pile of toys he referred,
And he seemed a lot peddle its opening.
His eyes – as Valentine! Dimple, as his merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His beautiful mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of its development is so white with snow;
The strain of a pipe held tightly in its teeth;
The smoke encircled his head like a crown;
He had a broad face and a little round the stomach,
What shocked when traveling as a bowl of jelly.
He was plump and plump, a right merry old elf,
And I laugh when I saw in spite of myself;
A wink of an eye and a twist of the head,
Soon gave me to know that he had nothing to fear;
He does not speak a word, but it was straight to his work,
Meets in the Netherlands and then with a jolt,
And with the finger aside of his nose,
NOD and the chimney rises;
I jumped on his sled, his team has a whistle,
And much all flew like a camp.

But I heard him exclaim, led the first sight
“Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.”

Well, hell.  Humor 0, International Relations 1.  Happy Holidays.

Reading Gould just now, I ran across the word molluscan meaning pertaining to a mollusk.

This is so cool.  I haven’t been so excited about an animal adjective since cygneous.

Now I have to quickly learn how to program a TWAIN driver so that I can release a Linux scanning program called MolluScan.  It will, of course, need hooks into the Nautilus file browser, but I can skip having to write OCR functionality into it because no mollusk — not even a cephalopod — can, to the best of my knowledge, read.

(Yes, this is a joke.)

I just got a Spam message with the title “dixon mole expectorate interrogatory cheerleader”.  I marked it spam, then had second thoughts, and thought, “I’ve got to see this one” (yes, I occasionally think in italics) and clicked “Undo”.  Here are the contents:

——————————
dukedom tombstone sisal? bygone, tombstone dixon.
lawmen upperclassmen bygone materiel cheerleader tombstone, barr
dukedom interrogatory cinematic quill built.

footpad man mole

barr academia univariate? circumstance, speck materiel.
montpelier barr built cromwellian litton espousal, barr
footpad allow retiree montpelier sisal.

crater toady man

campsite quill dukedom? sisal, bygone vertebrate.

lawmen cinematic.
——————————

That’s it.  No link, no misspelled drug name, no implication that I should be worried about the size of any of my body parts, no comma-plus-an-exclamation-point to render it in the imperative.  Just that aphasic string.  For what?  Channel testing?  List pruning?  Anarchy?  Better ideas?

I’m looking for someone who can do some simple, short translations from English into Scottish Gaelic.  Fluent speakers, please, preferably Scottish (rather than Canadian).  I can pay you or, preferably, if you have a freelance translation service, I can give you a free ad on this site — one year for every 15 minutes of translation time on your part.

Can anyone help?

There’s an eBay lot that I really, really want.  The auction closes in less than one hour (4:40 a.m. PDT is probably some sensible time in Johannesburg, where the seller resides), and the bidding is at 14% of my high bid.  I would love to get this lot for 14% of my high bid.

I can’t sleep, as you can probably tell, so I’ve been fiddling (they call it a “one tweak loop” in computerese) with the sidebar.  Let me know what you think — if you can tell the difference.

Firefox did not complain about the word “computerese”.  Wow.

Anyone have a better translation for schnelle Lieferung aus USA – Alles Bestens, gern wieder !!! than snaps supply out of the USA – everything, gladly in the best way again!!!?