Greetings From Planet Spam

As an intermittent blogger who can't seem to get on a regular publishing schedule, I sometimes go weeks (months) without looking at the "dashboard" of this blog. Sometimes I'll pop on the site just to jot down some note for an article I'd like to write, when time permits. Other times I may look through old drafts, trying to breathe new life into an idea which lost appeal, or lost out in the daily time lottery around here. Usually the effort of slogging through several hundred writing attempts that never made publishing grade is agonizing enough to make me close the tab in discouragement. Rarely do I look around behind the scenes and see what kind of traffic has been visiting here at Polite Ravings.

But for some reason, a few days ago, I decided to poke around the stats pages. It was nice to see that, whether I post new material or not, there are still a few people finding me and reading a bit. Of course, since some of those new readers are finding me on some Uzbekistan google channel, I have a feeling that my wit and charm are lost on them. And God love Lego fans. I posted just two articles mentioning Legos, but, perhaps due to the frequency with which I used popular search terms (Legos, ninjago), that post stills get lots of hits, and occasionally a total stranger (and Lego fan) will comment on the old article.

While reading the comments, I noticed a tab that I don't remember noticing before. It was more like a button and and said "Spam." I wasn't sure what to expect, since the only spam I know about is the crazy list of email messages I dump periodically, with subject lines that promise to share Kim Kardashian's diet secrets, Katy Perry's eyelash secrets, and an a variety of unnamed secrets involving the word "enlarge." I've never known where spam comes from, and I don't know how spam finds my email account. All I really know about spam is that it is to be avoided. It's bad, and I should never open anything that looks suspicious because that can lead to more spam. 

So, I wondered, should I click the "Spam" button on the comments page and see if my blog is getting enlargement offers?

I clicked. I looked. I laughed! This was a different kind of spam. Turns out, there are many bloggers out there who are even more desperate to find readers than I am. The techies who advise bloggers on increasing traffic have evidently designed a formula for "mutual admiration spam" (my invented term - can someone design a cute piece of clip art with that phrase on it? We can share the royalties.)  I'm guessing this process involves the ambitious blogger conducting searches for terms that relate to their blogs, and when they find another blog that uses similar terms, they send a "comment." I say "send a comment," which is probably pretty naive, since I imagine these are computer-generated comments of some kind. They must be, because they are so horribly worded, cobbling together some thin reference to a search term in my blog, paired with praise for my blog in general, then, (the big payoff to these spammers) a link back to their website.

This may not sound interesting, but when I share some of the garbled messages you will understand why I had to bring this to the attention of my dedicated readers. These comments are some kind of human/computer hybrid-speak...a kind of new, helpless and witless language for peddling your product while reaching out to strangers. It's reminiscent of credit card offers for dogs or the deceased. Here is an example of what I'm talking about, in response to my post entitled To Your Health! 

"Asking questions are really pleasant thing if you aren't understanding something completely, except this post provides good understanding even. My homepage..."

I used this example first because it is the most recent and it fits the generic pattern. There are literally hundreds of variations on this theme - or there were until I deleted them. Many of the comments are in response to that particular blog post, which is tagged for aging and health, and therefore draws more general search traffic. Since a large number of spam comments read very similar to the one above, that suggests to me that there is some formula for creating this kind of fake response while sneaking in a link to another blog. I'm very glad that Blogger weeds these out, since there are hundreds more of these spam comments than there are real ones!

But let me share a few of the more humorous fake compliments for my blog. They are so touching in their utter lack of sincerity:

"You make running a blog look easy. The overall look of your web site is fantastic, let alone the content material!"

"Content material" will make a good addition to the Repetitive Redundancies file. And yes, dear reader, it is easy to run a blog when you forget about it for months on end! There are dead and expired gadgets everywhere...this joker never took a peek.

Here's another example of an extravagant compliment for my blog, written by someone/ something who/that clearly has not glanced at my bare-bones effort at design:


"Wow, amazing weblog structure! How lengthy have you been running a blog for?"

or this over-the-top analysis:


"Its an amazing post in favor of all the web visitors; they will get benefit from it I am sure. Feel free to surf my site..."

I know it is tempting to think the writer is just someone for whom English is not their main language. But after reading pages and pages of these, a pattern emerges that suggests the spam comment formula works something like this:

Compliment site feature

+ mention sharing blog post

+ state benefit to web audience

+ add link to own website

= instant anonymous comment

Here's one of many that fit that boring pattern but made me chuckle:

"Excellent post...I'll certainly digg it and ...reccommend it to my friend...I confident they'll be benefitted from this web site. Please check out my website..."

(Note that the writer chose two different spellings for the same term in this brief message.)

Several comments mention the importance of the issue I'm writing about and compliment my great research or excellent insight into this concern. If they didn't end with a pitch for their website, which is unrelated in any way to the post, I'd probably be fooled and touched by those comments. But here's an example of a comment attached to my fluffy, 95% content-free post called Say It With Flowers:

"Excellent research of your blog. This paragraph is genuinely a pleasant one it helps new internet viewers who are wishing in favor of blogging. See my site at..."

Since the post contained photos of flowers and plants around my house, I'm not sure how it helped "new internet viewers." But the research - there's no research, there is just a map and a fake calendar charting my interpretation of Gulf Coast weather! Could it be that a webcrawler service found this chart and identified it as weather research? That is rather chilling, isn't it? Someone could be quoting my "research" right now, in a speech or paper citing more definitive proof of global warming. Who knows?

Likewise, several of the comments to To Your Health! mentioned they would put a link on their website back to my post. I don't know if anyone remembers that blog, but it began with another of my lame charts designed to look like a pop-psych "test" to help the reader discover hidden signs of diseases. It is satire! I'm a housewife, not a doctor, but look at this sample comment:

"I think this is among the most important information for me. And I am glad reading your article. This will mean much better for the website viewer and reader. I show articles and sell the weight loss on..."

As I look at these comments, I'm very glad I didn't stumble on them sooner. When I began my blogging efforts, I was desperate for feedback, any feedback. I would have lapped up this eloquent but confusing comment for Am I a Hoarder? when I published it back in 2011:

"Ahaa, its fastidious dialogue concerning this article at this place at this website. I have read all that, so now me also commenting here. Visit my website at..."

I gather this writer missed the point about the fill-in-the-blank method of creating convincingly sincere spam. 

If you are wondering why I didn't just cut and paste these comments in their entirety, Blogger doesn't allow that. When I tried to highlight text, I was prevented from doing anything except deleting the entire post or converting it to "not spam." That meant I had to hand-write all the entries I wanted to quote, then type them into this post. Can you imagine how hard it was for me to write and type these errors and misspellings - twice? But I guess that policy protects all of us from being maliciously quoted or used as spam against others. And perhaps by quoting them I'm breaking some fine-print clause in the Terms and Agreements for Blogger use. But I love bad writing, I love the folly of people trying to pretend they like something they've never seen, and I am enjoying learning about how web traffic and back-linking really works. So I had to share these amusing comments, just as I always want to share bad writing, wherever I find it.

And I saved my favorite for last, because I am not entirely sure it is spam. The writer links to a website that is actually related to the post topic (health), and after the obligatory compliment for the layout and content, the writer makes an interesting point:

"I do have a couple of questions? for you if you tend not to mind. Is it only me or does it seem like a few of these responses come across like coming from brain dead folk: :-P"

Hey, keep them coming.

Why Yes, I'm Prejudiced...

...if you mean that my brain prejudges situations based on previous experience, facts in evidence and in advance of specific actions. But that's probably not what you mean.

"Prejudiced" usually describes the attitude or actions of one who prejudges another on the basis of an assumption about them based on a single or limited human dimension. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition is:

• having or showing a dislike or distrust that is derived from prejudice; bigoted:people are prejudiced against usprejudiced views

In that context, the connotation is negative, but using the literal translation from Latin, prae meaning "before" and judex meaning "judge," it does not have to be applied negatively. It is possible to judge someone as having positive qualities associated with only one dimension (i.e. beauty = goodness). But the term is rarely applied to that sort of judgement.

Normally, we talk of prejudice as applied to race, gender, sexual orientation and a few other categories. When society discusses prejudice, the reference is usually to a person or persons who use narrow character assessments to make broad assumptions about groups. But are there other ways to prejudge people? I think there are. I prejudge people based on how their actions affect themselves, those around them and the whole of society. The actions which cause me to do that rarely have anything to do with race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. I assess individuals by how they treat others. Does that qualify as a prejudice?

If so, COLOR ME PREJUDICED. I am guilty.

Because, all other things being equal, this is how my brain thinks:

I prejudge cashiers who can't make change as deficient.


I prejudge people who speak poorly as being ignorant.


I prejudge children who are publicly rude as having negligent parents.


I prejudge people who drive aggressively as obnoxious.


I prejudge people with multiple junk cars in their yards as being lazy.


I prejudge people who scream and curse at their children in public to be bad parents.


I prejudge people who wear pants with a waistband around their hips to be slaves to prison fashion.


I prejudge people who wear clothes that tightly cling onto and in between their rolls of fat to be legally blind and/or lacking in honest friends.


I prejudge people who leave their Christmas lights up all year as lacking in the most basic level of motivation.


I prejudge people who buy flashy cars and overpriced toys as having more money than sense.


I prejudge people who throw their trash on the ground to be lazy.


I prejudge people who buy junk food with food stamps as irresponsible.


I prejudge people who use illegal drugs as plain old stupid.


I prejudge people who drink and drive as criminals.


I prejudge people who vote strictly according to their holy books and leave their God-given brain at home as under-informed.


I prejudge people who have surgery to fight the natural effects of time and age to be in denial.


I prejudge people who cut in line as rude.


I prejudge grown-ups who wear t-shirts featuring cuddly cartoon characters as childish.

~~~~~:::::~~~~~

Allow me stress this fact: I have been guilty of many of these acts myself.  As such, I expect you may have judged me similarly when I committed those acts. And I don't blame you for that.

As humans, we are each in possession of a brain that makes thousands of observations per minute. I draw from past experience to find data that applies to present circumstances.

I judge first with my eyes, but I don't stop there. My ears vote almost simultaneously. I don't need to interact with you in order to form an opinion, and if I don't have that interaction, my knowledge is stunted at the opinion stage.

If I do interact with people from groups that are different than my own demographic - white, middle-class, college-educated, middle-aged, married, straight, Christian - I will likely find other areas of commonality that bridge the initial gaps in similarity. Though that interaction, I gain the opportunity to see beyond our differences in religion, education, skin color or choice of partner. We may bond over gardening or sports or a book we both read. The world of possibilities for similarity is huge, compared to the narrow categories in which we may differ.

I believe that it impossible to think without prejudging. However, that is not the same as "passing judgement." To "pass judgement" on another person is discouraged, but I think that, at least in the literal sense, it is very difficult to assess facts associated with a person and not come to some kind of conclusion. It needn't be a conclusion of good or bad, right or wrong or any other pair of opposites, but we can be aware of a fact and judge that that particular fact doesn't change our overall assessment of the person.

Prejudging a person or situation is an unavoidable function of a working brain, and is only bad if it is where we stop thinking. Prejudging should only be the first stage in an assessment, and is best followed up by more information. The trick is to go beyond initial, limited impressions, the opinions of others and our gut reactions, to discover a whole person. I don't want to be judged by my demographic profile or a single trait any more than you do. If you must judge me, try to do so by observing how I treat my fellow man.

And I will try to extend the same courtesy to you.

Tuesday's Term Turnaround, v. 2

The blockbuster yet awkwardly-titled series returns after taking a week off for spring break. Now I'm back, well-nourished and ready to introduce some words that need to disappear from use in their currently misused forms. I'm depending on my brilliant and literate reading audience to assist me in achieving that goal.

There have been thousands of articles and blog entries devoted to the topic of word overuse, which means I didn't have to look very far to discover some candidates for this week's list. After you read mine, go here and here if you want to see some real effort. I'm pretty haphazard: I scratch my head, think about my personal pet peeves and start writing.  But some of these people devote their whole professional lives to creating complete and useful lists of words they want to bury. I wonder if that pays well.

If you still don't know where I'm going with this post, please look at the first installment of Tuesday's Term Turnaround, where I explain why "perhaps a vocabulary tune-up is in order."

For the rest of you, let us begin to examine some truly overused words.

basically - adverb
Here's an example of how people like to use "basically" to start as sentence in which they'd like to sound sincere, although the facts dispute this:

Man: "Basically, I'm a one-woman man."
Date: "How many times have you been married?"
Man: "Four. But only to one woman at a time."

This guy wants his date to believe that his fundamental nature is monogamous, so he precedes his statement with "basically." But "basic" is not a perfect replacement for "true" or "accurate."

Another abuse of "basically" is when the speaker wants to convey they idea that they are only sharing part of a more complex or lengthy story, as in:

Prisoner X: "So what are you in for?"
Prisoner Y: "Murder, robbery, possession, speeding and illegal lane-change."
Prisoner X: "What happened?"
Prisoner Y: "Basically, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Notice how "basically" spares the listener of the sordid details leading to Prisoner Y's incarceration. By saying "basically," he suggests unnamed, complicated circumstances which are central to the truth of the story, but unrevealed.

It is best to use "basically" sparingly, and to apply it when only one feature, factor or variable is being measured or analyzed. It should refer to something in the base form, i.e. simple, essential, primary. If you need to discuss something complicated, don't confuse the issue by introducing the idea as simple.  For example:

DON'T: "Basically, an anti-quark is just a really small part of an atom that is the opposite of a quark."


DO: "I am incapable of describing a quark or an anti-quark in terms you can understand. Basically, you should look it up."


totally - adverb
Another adverb, (for those of you keeping track), "totally" is like fingers on chalkboard for me. When it is used to confirm attendance at something ("Are you going to the party?" "I'm totally there!"), I clench my fists and grit my teeth.

Other abuses worthy of a citizen's arrest, and some suggested substitutes:

"She totally shouldn't wear those skinny jeans because her butt is totally hanging out and she basically just looks like a totally flat slob."

Instead, try:

"Those skinny jeans aren't very flattering to a size XXL figure. Her mother was completely justified in suggesting she wear something else." 

"The Patriots will totally dominate the Giants."

Instead, try:

"The Patriots were completely dominated by the Giants." 

"If I'm crowned Miss Northeast Granger, I will be totally about stopping global warming before it totally kills the Earth."

Instead, try:

"If crowned Miss Northeast Granger, I will devote myself to the awesome cause of ending global warming, since that is guarantees lots of publicity." 

 

Think of "totally" as a word reserved for statements of mathematical precision. If you can quantify your response at or above the 99% threshhold, you can totally use "totally." And in the name of all that is sacred, please apply that same rule of thumb to the word "absolutely."

amazing
This word shows up on many overused word lists. "Amazing" must be the go-to substitute for people who were told they say "awesome" too much.

Ending in -ing, you'd expect it to be used as a verb. Something that is amazing should cause amazement to occur. But in this sample exchange which passes for polite conversation:

A: Hi! How are you?
B: I'm amazing! How are you?
A: I'm awesome, thanks for asking.
B: No problem.

you'll notice that neither person mentioned any experience or activity that would inspire awe or amazement. They just referred to their current status as being capable of doing so. ("No problem" in place of "you're welcome" is a peeve for another day.) Referring to the capacity to amaze without specifying how you achieve this effect is inconclusive. If you never describe a person, including yourself, as "amazing," you are safe.

Since grammar is never far from the mind of any of my devoted readers, let's pause to hurriedly open another tab and find out exactly what part of speech "amazing" generally functions as, in lazy daily speech. Since it often describes or modifies a noun, but ends in "-ing," it must be a present participle. As such, "amazing" cannot be the main verb, much less the lone word, in a sentence.

"Amazing" is usually applied liberally when discussing issues of beauty and fashion. Examples gushing from the red carpet commentary prior to an award ceremony might include:

"Jennifer Aniston's dress is an amazing shade of gunmetal grey that does absolutely nothing for her complexion."

"Check out the number of ripples on Ryan Reynolds' abs. Amazing!" 

"That Kardashian sister is going to have slit her skirt much higher if she wants to compete with Angelina's amazing thigh exposure."

If you want to use "amazing" correctly, reserve it for situations where something truly caused amazement. "To amaze" suggests an extreme level of surprise. The original meaning actually conveyed fear, as in an alarming or terrifying thing or event. The word has evolved to connote a lesser affect, but should still be used for exceptional cases, not just a modifier of exaggeration.

Miss Aniston's dress was probably a "pretty" or "dull" shade of grey. The color of the dress probably didn't cause astonishment; the dress probably didn't impress or astound the audience purely by virtue of the "amazing" color. Sometimes an "amazing" dress is simply a "nice" dress.

Last time on Tuesday's Term Turnaround, I dissected five words, which took much too long for the limited appeal. I decided to stop at three this week, which means I'm done.  Next week, I'll be whining about the misuse of the following words: diversity, addictive, need and possibly exhausted. I'm also taking requests for this Hit Parade, so if you would like to suggest a word or term that drives you crazy, post a comment and let me know, and I'll try to find something annoying  and overly-complicated to say about it.

So what's left to say? Basically, go have a totally amazing day!