Fans of the television show Friends may recall the episode in which the dim-witted Joey Tribbiani discovers the built-in thesaurus in his word-processing program and tries to spruce up a letter of recommendation for his friends’ adoption agency. He thesaurusizes every word, so that the sentence They are warm, nice people with big hearts turns into They are humid, prepossessing homo sapiens with full-sized aortic pumps. That bit of sitcom silliness has actually turned into a grim reality, now that online content farms use so-called spinning software to modify a source text by automatically swapping out words with ostensible synonyms. (The goal is to create new textual fodder that can be used on websites without search engines like Google suspecting that the content has been duplicated from elsewhere.) I recently came across a particularly ham-handed example on a news aggregator which lifted an article from the Star-Ledger about a looming fight between two congressional candidates. The original said that the Democratic showdown…will be bloody and fairly evenly matched considering the county machinery behind each candidate. In the spun version, the showdown will be full of blood and sincerely uniformly suited deliberation the county equipment at the back any candidate. Sadly, this sort of thesaurus-driven gobbledygook can be found in abundance online, as if Joey and his full-sized aortic pump had taken over the Internet.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 15:42:40 +0000
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