Monday, April 30, 2007

Infixing in spam

I check my junk folders pretty often — real stuff does end up in there occasionally still. Aside from reminders about how out of touch I am with some aspects of contemporary American culture, I really enjoy the bizarre grammar you find in stuff in various languages: for languages I don't read well, like Portuguese, finding oddities I can confirm is just plain fun. There's surely some babelfishing going on, though I guess we should refer to it as babelphishing, but a lot is bad in other ways.

Anyway, one of those financial scams today had infixing:
Un Friggin Believable
I can understand the use of friggin here instead of the more powerful form, and the so-called g-dropping goes with the level of style. But doesn't it look odd to see it written as three words? Maybe this is supposed to be getting at the oh. my. god kind of intonation? It's filled with typos and non-native structures, so we can't draw any real conclusions. Of course some typos are aimed at avoiding the filter, surely:
To dascontinue subscriptisn reply wzth only …

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