Spam As Folk Art for 2006 September 7

Why is "Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases" the top-downloaded ebook at Project Gutenberg, beating out Sherlock Holmes and the Kama Sutra? It's unlikely to be some thoughtless whim of the Internet zeitgeist. Someone at clickolinko speculates it's a popular download for spammers, who crave its piquant and palatable early-20th-century cliches for their subject lines. Indeed, "architectural grandeur" and "indwelling delight" sound just like the subjects of spam we've received; though, in fairness to the memory of 15KUP compiler Grenville Kaiser (author of numerous public speaking books), so do any two words picked at random and stuck next to each other.

As the Transcriber's Note says, "The blandness of contemporary (2006) speech would be relieved by the injection of some of these gems." I'm sure spammers would be only too happy to oblige. The appointed function of 15KUP is to allow the lowest of pitchmen to simulate the trite and commonplace cant of his social betters. This mummery of words, hollowest of hollow shams, need last only long enough for its perpetrator to meet some grovelling goal. Like spam filter-baffle, 15KUP glibly condones the elevation of syntax over semantics, a twisting of the English language in order to sneak past a filter.