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Journal WannaBeGeekGirl's Journal: I've been flamed so much anyway... 16

Journal by WannaBeGeekGirl
don't read this if you don't have a liberal sense of humor--it has no hidden agenda aside from humor

Word salad is a string of words that vaguely resemble language, and may or may not be grammatically correct, but is utterly meaningless. (credit given below)

Now, before going to the link below--Can you guess the first public figure who came to mind as a media favorite for his "word salad" audio bites? (haha that food pun was typed with no malice aforethought, but horridly funny)

scary if you think along the same wavelength as me and then read the link...

definition above of "word salad" is from: Wiki's article about "Word Salad" and the commentary is from me. Clarity so you know who to b&m at.
This discussion was created by WannaBeGeekGirl (461758) for no Foes, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

I've been flamed so much anyway... More

I've been flamed so much anyway...

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  • A long time ago, sometime back in the 1980s, I made a program for generating word-salad using the probability of three-letter sequences from some input text. The results is vaguely flavored from the input, since many of the short words and syllables make it through unchanged, but scrambled. Thus a text on programming will generate word salad of a different taste than a text from a newspaper article, for example; and Norwegian input will result in Norwegian-flavored word salad.

    The input text is stripped of

    • However, the literary value of such output is not that large, though it makes for good printer-testing material.

      This is more impressive than the majority of programs I write in my spare time or to learn new languages. And I agree, it is good printer-testing material. I prefer it to the boring test pages that come with the printer software or the old 70's/80's ASCII silhoulettes of a curvy pinup girl for the old dot matrix printers.

      I will have to go check out the postmodernism generator. Just because you say it has a "gee-whiz" factor I'm sure I'll be thrilled as I am easily impressed and amused! The whole

      • I learned programming with FORTRAN when I was in high school, probably 1975. FORTRAN IV, I think. That language [wikipedia.org] dates from 1957, before I was born. I learned C in the fall of 1976, my freshman year in college, on a heavily modified Unix Version 6, running on a PDP-11/70. BASIC was also around at that point, but was even then somewhat disdained. :-)
        • When I first read the subject several things ran through my head. One of them being that someone had discovered an interpretor for shy antisocial types that translated their less-than-social-under-pressure comments into what they really meant to say to more socially acceptible types of commentary. (Gah, did I just say that, I should be sacked!)

          I learned C in the fall of 1976, my freshman year in college, on a heavily modified Unix Version 6, running on a PDP-11/70. BASIC was also around at that point, but was even then somewhat disdained. :-)

          ~bow~ I have touched a PDP-11, but it had a dusty "out of order" sign on it. So I am in awe. In my personal computer museum that I'm looking to donate the

          • The significance of the title struck me after I clicked the Submit button. :-) Still, that might be an interesting sort of interpreter to implement.

            (The people responsible for the subtitles have been sacked... :-) )

            That's a neat collection. Yes, the PET was a Commodore. And the Lisa was cool. When I was in school (second bachelor's degree), one of my classes went on a field trip to see the first Lisa models (I think that it was mostly an excuse for the instructor to go and see them).

            A Cray would be very

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ashtead ( 654610 )

        I wrote it in C sometime around 1987 and I still have the program here somewhere, running on modern-day Linux. It was either Turbo C on a PC running MS-DOS or on a HP9000-300 series machine (what used to be called a "workstation") running HP-UX that I made it for first, and then ported it the other one, since I had access to, and used, both kinds of machines at that time.

        Seeing as I still have that program around here, when looking at it, I see it was made so it could take an argument specifying the numbe

    • Sounds like a travesty generator [eskimo.com]. I implemented one, per the Byte article, in C on a TI Professional computer around that time. I'll have to see if I can dig up the code. I think the compiler was Lifeboat C, maybe - I believe that was before Microsoft offered a DOS C compiler. There's a web hosted version here [eskimo.com].

      Here's a 1000-character travesty seeded with your post:

      A long character is gibberish, wherences formed a for not seed. All repeats
      formed weightta be occasional common probabiliters a digraph sure

      • Does

        Norwegian-flavored word-salad [flickr.com]
        have garden gnomes in it? Or is that just an American salad delicacy?

        I know, I know, my humor gets worse as the week winds down... This was just one of my favorite OTM comics and I couldn't resist.

        Apologies...
        • Oh, my. :-) That's hilarious. :-D

          Careful, though. You might get in trouble with the SPCG. ;-)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ashtead ( 654610 )

          I think a real Norwegian salad like this would contain moose, an occasional 8- or 9-string fiddle tuned in the key of B; many occurrences of words containing one or more of the letters æ, ø, and å and occasionally é. Blåbærsyltetøy (Blueberry jam) can be expected. There might also be some red, white, and blue banners in there, with stripes in the proportions of width 6 red - 1 white - 2 blue - 1 white - 6 red. Maybe lutefisk, but not surströmming since that

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ashtead ( 654610 )

        Yes, that seems to be similar to what I've made. And that article could have been from BYTE, as I mentioned above, I don't remember exactly which of the many magazines with the many "hands-on" articles in it that was.

        But I still have the program, though it doesn't do punctuation as the example above shows. Either way, these travesty generators seem good sources for new, seemingly useful and certainly wonderful words :) Wonder what Lewis Carroll could have written about besides slaying jabberwocks or hunt

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