Honor be to Mudjekeewis!

In my in-box, every morning,
Greetings from a slew of spammers,
Each, to fool the filters, using
In the header and the body,
Random lines from "Hiawatha":
"And the fierce Kabibonokka"
(Get your clearitol and cum pills);
"Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water"
(Make your wife or girlfriend speechless)
"Sat the ancient Mudjekeewis"
(Safe Prescription Medication);
"And Nokomis fell affrighted"
(Over half a million clients);
"For the maid with yellow tresses"
(Free Fed-Ex on every order);
Till I have the sense of hearing
The entire fucking cosmos
Droning, unenjambed, insistent,
In tetrameter trochaics,
Lulling me to drowsy numbness...
"Make a bed for me to lie on."
(May already be a winner).

-CW

I have finally caught up on all comments from the previous week, so you should check the last few columns for responses to your commentary.

Stan -

If what you say is true, then you would enjoy the heck out of this book. It's not all about etymology, but Nunberg's insightful comments on all sorts of angles about the way language lives and, indeed, evolves, will hold your interest throughout. I guarantee it.

Osborne Ink -

There is a certain reporter for HuffPost who revels in the "texting spelling" of certain words, such as your examples, as well as "oh noes!" and suchlike. I still can't decide whether it is annoying, or a public service to those who don't have easy access to teenagers to decipher such things. I have to admit, I had to look up "pwn" or "pwned" the first time I saw it. What won't those crazy kids come up with next, eh?

Nunberg has a whole chapter (all the "chapters" are essays of only a few pages) on blogging, but he takes the long view. He points out, interestingly enough, that this EXACT SAME DEBATE took place -- over a hundred years ago. The first "Twitter" debate over the possible changes to English happened over... are you sitting down?... the telegraph. Words cost money back then, and so the foreshortened English style of telegrams was seen by some as the foreshadowing of the death of Standard English. Didn't happen. He points out that today's students know the difference as well -- the SAT essay graders say they almost never see such fripperies on formal essays by the same students misspelling text messages. They know the difference, in other words.

But, as I promised yesterday, here is his final chapter, in full. It is a parody of "Hiawatha," and if you know the original poem, is hilarious:

Honor Be To Mudjekeewis!

In my in-box, every morning,
Scads of offers sent by spammers,
Each, to fool the filters, strewing
In the header and the body,
Random lines from "Hiawatha":
"And Nokomis warned her often"
Get your clearitol and cum pills;
"O beware of Mudjekeewis"
Make your wife or girlfriend speechless;
"Lie down not upon the meadow"
Safe Prescription Medication;
"And Nokomis fell affrighted"
Over half a million clients;
"Downward through the evening twilight"
Free Fed-Ex on every order;
Till I have the sense of hearing
The entire fucking cosmos
Droning, unenjambed, insistent,
In tetrameter trochaics,
Lulling me to drowsy numbness...
"Wahonowin! Wahonowin!"
May already be a winner!

-CW

You asked him two questions I wanted to ask: bloggers and spelling nazis. There's a subset to those questions, however: deliberate misspellings. "Teh," "Pwned," "lulz," etc being the best-known examples, these are meant to be ironic commentary in and of themselves -- meta-words that can only ever possibly appear in a graphic medium, whether screen or page. I would love to ask Nunberg about this. Is the internet actually creating a new kind of word?

...Stan