Those words that one is asked to type to prove he's not a spam machine when leaving comments on other people's blogs have a name. I've heard it but I can't remember it. Anyway I once made a list of ones and thought I'd attempt a Jabberwocky-type poem or piece of writing using them because some are so nearly like real words that they would seem merely typos until the reader caught on that no one could be as bad a typist as the piece would turn out to be. The idea still appeals to me but for the most part I actually have things to say that I'd rather use my time writing. I've just left a comment on a blog and the word that came up to type was a real word, grave. I know those configurations are generated by computer without what we call human intelligence creating or monitoring them. So I assume, just as a chimpanzee at a typewriter, r computer, might actually write a few words or even a sentence that makes sense [but never a work to rival Shakespeare, or even the more monosyllabic pages of Gertrude Stein] once in a while a bot will produce a real word -- a very serious one in this case.
4 comments:
June -- I believe that word you are looking for is captcha -- method of word verification.
You must be a "word" person. Perhaps that is one of the reasons you teach writing.
-- barbara
This is a fun idea, June!
Barbara, thank you. That's a good word that sounds like "capture" and is meant to catch the spammers.
Conda, maybe you'd like to give it a try.
I was saving bits of things that people left in returned library books and turning them into poems for a while. But I wasn't trying to combine them - just one item per poem.
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