Spam As Folk Art for 2006 September 7

It may surprise no one to learn that I'm interested in reshuffling public domain texts into new texts. But I've never actually tried my hand at it. I see shuffled public domain texts all the time in spam and it's pretty lousy. It constantly changes tone, lurching from dialogue to description to exposition in one incredibly long unbroken sentence, moving from topic to topic. The most prominent example was the "Master Key" spam series, popular a couple years back, which took as its text an L. Frank Baum book about electricity. I always thought that book must have come preinstalled with spamming software, because the results were only interesting until you did a little detective work and found the source.

But today I got a shuffled spam that was actually pretty good. Here it is, reformatted slightly as a story:

"I can excuse you, Bill, because it's your first day in the Cabinet. That is why I do not feelbound to accept this ultimatum. If you could see a joke, Bill, you wouldn't be the great popular orator you are."

"May we not make a historical reference to the corpse? You can see as much of her as you like when we are married."

"Between you and that tyranny stands the throne. It was not I who bungled the Factory Bill. That is a rather desirable extension of their interests, in my opinion. I only mention it to shew that the Prime Minister does not really wish to kill the veto."

"That can apply to both sides, if you like. He is settling the whole business with the King behind our backs. If I do not stand above them there is no longer any reason for my existence at all."

"Nothing that you can say will make any difference. It is what I am, not what I do, that you must worship in me. I demand an explanation of the words bungling and squabbling."

"They would hardly have ventured on that without a hint from somebody. 'It is what I am, not what I do, that you must worship in me.' And I can keep you to the point, sir, whether it suits you or not."

"If you provoke me, Bill, I'll drive you out of your constituency inside of two months. They sang it under the windows of his hotel next time he came. Thank Heaven, I am not a silly giggler like some I could mention."

"The King enters and waits on the threshold. And when the King is not setting me off, you are. The name you pretended to invent specially for me, the only women in the world for you. And even they can talk of nothing but the servants and the baby."

"My civil list leaves me a poor man among multi-millionaires. Yet we find enough to say to one another when we are alone together. It is looked down on by our men of genius as dirty work."

What's this spam's secret? It's taken from a play, and plays are almost all dialogue (note, though, that even the one stage direction, "The King enters and waits on the threshold", fits in with the dialogue here). More precisely, it's taken from a Shaw play, which inevitably consists of dialogue about one specific topic, and in which any line could come from any character. (More precisely still, it's taken from The Apple Cart.) The result is a text that's tantalizingly close to making sense. Others have noted the pure beauty of this Shavian spam, and I intend to apply its lesson in the future.

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.