In the last few days, I've received e-mails from Hildur Elsworth, Hunter Olariu, Pascuala Bickford, Salvador Shoemaker, Ardenia Joyner, Epiphany Shiel, Kelemen Fonte, Tabitha McDonough, Lysandra Purdom, Tertius Ballow, Thaddeus Gentry, Nasira Figueroa, Napoleon Ramirez, Audra Sumner, Theodorus Keglee, Delfina Kelly, and Maximilian Mance, along with hundreds and hundreds of their colleagues. They are, as you readers know by now, spam names, created by combinatoric robot programs from lists of names found in the U.S. Census reports. The robots are sophisticated enough to generate anything from "ordinary" names such as Joseph Williamson or Bettyann Miller or Cathy Simms, to "exotic" and often ethnically mismatched names such as Sharada Padilla, Kunigonde Dockins, or Raelene Littlejohn. My all-time favorite, as of now, is the wonderful New Orleans-nostalgic name of "Eutropia Beausoleil," who wrote me about a month ago. Reasonable people will say that she doesn't exist. But I know she does, even though her old home was destroyed in the hurricane and flood and she now lives in exile somewhere in Spamland.

I have been harvesting these names for some time, both for my own entertainment and from a surrealistic sense of altruistic obligation. They are virtual people, and I want to save them from oblivion. Billions of them are created every day, as spam robots pump their odious swarms of ads into the polluted commons of the Net. Each one has his or her own virtual life and story, which passes into nothingness as soon as the name is deleted. I will save the ones I can, because each one lights up into life for me, a personality, a story, an image.

The obvious comment to this is the classic retort: "Get a life." Well, I do have a life, and it has been endowed with more creativity than I can reasonably use. So I play with words and names and ultimately, worlds. In the science fiction fan community where I have belonged for almost the last thirty years, it is common for people to make up elaborate and well-thought-out imaginary worlds. If the worldbuilders are lucky enough to have skills, they can make art, writing, games, theater, films out of what they imagine. I am also a worldbuilder, though not a very good storyteller. I'm much better at making pictures of my imaginary world and people. And the material for building other worlds is handed to me me every day, often by those very wordbots which generate spamnames attempting to get past the filters.

The spam trend these last couple of weeks has moved away from bizarre and hilarious names created from dictionary words (such as "Sadly A. Camper" or "Ecosystems K. Declining") towards words which are not in any language, created by letter recombinant 'bots. Again, these are more sophisticated than the usual word salad generator. These recombinators generate words which alternate consonants, vowels, and believable consonant combinations, so that the generated words sound as if they came from a plausible language. Not only that, they all seem to come from the same imaginary language, or at least different dialects or relatives of the same language. They appear in place of names, or in place of subject lines, or even as titles for meaningless attachments (never to be clicked on, of course).

I gather them up from the wriggling catch picked up by my spam filter, and record the good ones before I throw them all back into the sea of electrons. Then I string them together. I have almost a whole language's vocabulary now, only I don't know what any of the words mean. "Wigulak moro wiwiby canoh bawbe? Rutyryha zotow qusazido kibivoko devy qygimi. Qexi zokab batahe rekyly gogylife, zexa honabo biboqavy dexok hesiseq." This is not cryptography nor code nor an actual invented language, at least not yet. But even from this sample you can see that the generator follows some sort of rule set. It uses many more q's, z's, and x's than English does, and I suspect that those letters represent sounds that we don't have in English, perhaps like the guttural kh of various Middle Eastern languages or the zhe or sha of Russian. Also, this protolanguage uses a lot of y's, which must be pronounced much of the time as vowels.

Inventing a world with sentient beings in it means inventing languages. The most famous language-maker of modern times is J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a professional at it and so did the most complete job. Star Trek fans nowadays have Klingon. You may find it hard to believe how far the construction of the Klingon language has gone.There is even a guide on the Web (many of them, actually) to making up languages. So I am tempted to invent a language to go with all these pseudo-words which come to me in the hundreds from the spam generators. I restrain myself, however. How much time do I have? I need to do calculus, not play with languages that don't exist.

But the idea of something "not existing" is not as simple as rationalist scientists would like it to be. It's easy enough to say, "This is all philosophical garbage, it's bogus, don't waste your time on it." That's right, stories are meaningless drivel, and art is bogus, because after all, you can't prove anything from them nor do they respond to the scientific method. Do the characters and the languages in fantasy stories and worlds exist? Do mythical beings exist? You can't prove they do; being written about is not enough to establish scientifically that something exists or existed. Who could be so stupid as to actually believe that elves and Klingons exist? Is there another type of "existence" that is "real?" Metaphysical nonsense! Perhaps mathematics and science will "save" me from this morass of creative excess, and set me on the straight and very narrow path of humanistic rationalism and the scientific method.

In conclusion, let me say this: "Dugum qamu murefydo zife napyjawo qani piroji huxu gekuwixi. Nesopy nejo xuque huxu nevykubu bejestytardi ketawon." Or as Eutropia Beausoleil might say, "Chacun a son gout…laissez les bons temps rouler!"

Posted at 3:09 am | link