At school, I was taught to use elegant variation - not repeating the same phrase exactly in a passage of writing, to make it more interesting. When I was later trained as a technical author, I learnt the opposite: use standard phrases so you don't confuse the reader.

Spammers have a vested interest in elegant variation (how many synonyms can they invent for male appendages for example?) - which - they hope - gets them past the spam filters so many people use. Some of the results are accidentally quite poetic - if somewhat lacking in understanding of 'English as she is spoke'. This one caught my eye:

"Greetings, brakes a software? Qualitative replacement is necessary!"

I guess they really meant "Hey you, is your computer knackered? Buy some illegal software from us and we'll finish the job for you, guaranteed cheap." But I have a vision of some robed sage declaiming the phrase out of a lighted window in sonorous tones!

"English and grammer software

http://whatabunchofspeciouscrap.com

Sale 25% Discount

Our World Wide patent writing tools enable simple sentences to become more sophisticated and professional.

Enhance your writing with:
Grammar check
Thesaurus
Spell check
English Dictionary
Templates
Punctuation corrections
Improved clarity" - from today's spam, and the fictitious, or at least syntax-errored, Mr Write Right [Andrew%20Goefferies@whatabunchofspeciouscrap.com]

(Names have been changed to protect the innocent - or at least to deny our Andy the pleasure of any web traffic.)

"Very discrete shipping and billing" - spam message subject

Actually, what the twerp is suggesting is discretion, not discreteness, for his/her dubious pharmaceutical products. However, I guess that the target market is probably not known for its intellectual or grammatical abilities.

Discrete means separate, distinct, self-contained - as in "the population of Uplyme parish lives in several discrete settlements, including Uplyme proper, Holcome, Harcombe and Rocombe".

Discreet means hidden, private or covert, as in "your package of expensive fake pharmaceuticals will be delivered in a discreet brown envelope, so no-one will know how sad you are."

I think that some of the confusion may come from that close relative of discreet: discretion - which has ony one "e".

"Any Form. Any Document. Anywhere. Anytime.

You are global and local
You are agile and regulated
You are speed and quality
You are growth and lean"

You're what?

Who was paid to write this gibberish I wonder? I came across the Teleform site as I'm writing a user guide for a client. I thought I might find out more what the product did, but instead, I came across this wonderful jargon-fest:

"Cardiff Teleform is a cornerstone piece of the Cardiff Intelligent Document solution.   It is the only solution that allows you to unify all of your paper-based processes throughout the enterprise, even processes in different departments, businesses and geographies.   This unified approach ensures you a consistent experience and full auditability of all of your processes.  TeleForm’s bullet-proof enterprise-class design ensures zero down time and unlimited scalability as the number of documents flowing through TeleForm increases. "

I nominate this for the Golden Bull Award. It's as stuffed with meaningless clichés as a plum pudding is with dried fruit. Yummy.

I think it could be summarised as "This product assists your business by automating data capture from forms." But I could be wrong, of course.

"November: With the presidential election looming, George Bush prepares reluctantly to relinquish the reigns of power..." - Practical Builder magazine's Viewpoint column, Jan 2008

No, he has hold of the reins of power.

Monarchs reign, and horsemen hold the reins to steer their steeds. Presidents preside.

Oh, and it never rains but it pours, especially if you don't proof your copy!

Just to keep up the penguin quotient here, a short but rather charming documentary about penguins - to be taken with a large pinch of salt of course, as it was released yesterday:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/epeng001.shtml?src=ip_potpw

- look now, as the clip will only be there for a few more days.

"Dr Charlesworth added that lack of trust about SUDS has also been exasperated by poorly fitted systems..." - NFU Countryside magazine, March 2008.

I don't know if it was the Doctor or the journalist who failed to get it right, but he or she meant exacerbated. Just because the spell checker didn't complain doesn't mean it's the right word! There is no substitute for proper proof-reading or for understanding of difficult words.

Exasperate means to annoy exceedingly; exacerbate means to make worse.

"Furthermore, the survey revealed that attendees were very satisfied with the amount of sessions offered in the fields of systems and technology" - report in tcworld, the trade journal of tekom, the German professional association for technical communication and Information-Development

A bit embarrassing this one. tekom is a sister organisation of my trade body, the ISTC. In the very same issue of its magazine, a contributor explains the importance of not only translating the words, but also the meaning and culture, of a text.

A native English speaker will sense (if not knowing why) that amount of sessions is wrong, because amount refers to a measurable quantity of something (like 100 grams of sand or  2 litres of water), not an integer number of discrete things (like six buckets of water).

I have mentioned before that it is unwise, if one wishes to be taken seriously, to rely on DIY translations without using the services of a native speaker to -  at least - proof a translation. I might have hoped that an organisation of professional writers would do the same!

Another in a series of words that often get mistaken.

"The carrot to compliment this stick is that ..." - Big Issue article on ID cards, March 17-23, 2008

The carrot actually complements the stick.

And a new example with slightly different usage just in on 14/04:

"If you’re a fan of Neue Helvetica, we invite you to take a look at Nimbus Sans Novus™. ... The families are large and complete. However, the Nimbus Sans Novus character sets include a compliment of Eastern European characters." - FontHaus mailing

Here, the set includes a complement of Eastern European characters.

A compliment is praise - and complimentary describes something nice said or written about something or someone. (Or something given free - for some reason I don't really understand. "A complimentary cup of coffee" presumably says nice things about you whilst you are drinking it!)

To complement is to add to, or to make something whole or more complete. Complementary describes something adding to, completing, or going well with, another.

First in a series of words that often get mistaken.

Heard on The Food Programme (Radio 4) yesterday:

"We are being extolled to sprinkle salt on our food" - Simon Parkes

No we aren't - we are being exhorted. You extol the virtues of something you like; you exhort people to do something.

"coreldraw graphics suite 12 - 49    cakewalk project 5 - 59    longtion autorun pro enterprise 12 - 39    autodesk autocad electrical 2006 - 99    microsoft sql server developer edition 2005 - 69 symantec antivirus corporate 10 - 29 adobe photoshop cs3 extended - 89 ulead photoimpact 12 - 79 ^ type ^getsoftdiscount .com^ in Internet Exp!orer Erase ^ before you type in Internet Exp!orer ^ " - from a spam message received today

Given the cluelessness of the average surfer, does this silly spammer actually think anyone will bother to follow these tortuous pidgin instructions? After one has deciphered what the message is about (it was all mixed up with spurious blather to defeat Bayesian analysis), one is then expected to copy and paste part of the message to get to the site, remembering to correct the syntax error (space) in the URL on the way. All this to buy some pirated software from a place with no street address? Puh-leease.

The server is in Oz, and the domain belongs to some geezer in Dubai. I wouldn't buy a used camel off him, I have to say.

They even seem to have stolen their mission statement from someone else entirely.

"Our Mission
To deliver superior software products and services that empower our partners and customers to dramatically improve their development, deployment, integration and management of quality applications worldwide.

Our Team
We employ only the best professionals. Our development team has collected great analysts and programmers each having degrees in areas of responsibility as well as 3 to 10 years of professional experience. We are happy to embody our inventive ideas into optimal solutions for our customers using the most relevant information technologies. "

Seen at Morrison's supermarket in Bridport, on the Vacancies board:

Oven Fresh Manager

Frozen Assistant

"An attractive ground floor studio apartment located in the town centre and comprising large studio room with marble fireplace fitted kitchen, separate bathroom, high ceilings, and close to all shops, pubes, cafes and the beach" - Ad from last week's The View From Bridport (free paper)

The web site version doesn't commit the same mistake, but the gremlin was obviously in action again:

"A spacious gound floor period studio flat offered in good decoartive order throughout, retaining many original features with high ceilings and marble fireplace. Located in Lyme Regis town centre, close to the beach and all of it's local amenities to include shops, pubs, restaurants, theatre and cinema. Early viewings advised!"

'To include' makes it sound like Lyme is a building site that will eventually have facilities - which is not the case, I hasten to add.

Where do they find these ignoramuses, I wonder?

is a press release of fascinating ghastliness.

"Lingerie Luminaries Agent Provocateur have more or less single handedly transformed the attitude to covering the female form in exactly the correct fashion to empower the wearer and cause a perpendicular attitude in the voyeur. But what to show and what to shroud?

"Currently spread eagle across the walls of the Agent Provocateur in Stuttgart, Berlin and Leeds, Paper Voyeur wallpaper by DED."

Whatever Nik Daughtry* is, he or she should be ashamed of such trashy and ignorant copy. It combines grisly coyness about sex with a heavy handed link between two disparate subjects, plus incomprehensibility and a sprinkling of grammatical and punctuation errors to get us through to the end.

For wallpaper, there's MasterCard. But copy like this? Priceless.

The press release

* All you need to know about Daughtrys - pretentious, moi?

"They fell in love ... as he was talking about all the miners' diseases he wants to cure - psitticosis [sic] and things" - Lucy Fleming discussing the plot of Brief Encounter on Radio 4's Today programme

As more informed readers will know, psittacosis (not psitticosis)  is a disease of parrots that humans can catch; miners get silicosis.

Perhaps I am expecting too much of an actress (sorry, actor), but this level of general knowledge is just so depressing. Lucy is Celia Johnson's daughter, so one might have assumed she knows the dialogue quite well. Still, they both begin with a sibilant and end in "osis" and are boring science-y stuff - so who cares?

You may be able to hear her repeat this live, tonight.

Aside: psittacosis is an example of a zoonosis - a disease of animals that humans can catch - like bovine TB, brucellosis, avian flu, and the wonderfully-named glanders and farcy, sounding like a music-hall duo - but a nasty horse disease. I particularly like its plural: zoonoses - one of those words that is so irresistibly easy to mispronounce. Like bed-raggled, misl-ed and reus-ed!

More about zoonoses.

"Porlock Rutting Weekend 2008
An all inclusive weekend. October 10th - 12th
Two nights bed and breakfast. Exmoor dinner on Saturday evening.
Two expeditions to watch red deer rut and an Exmoor Wildlife Safari.
Very limited places. All inclusive price £195" - Porlock Visitor Centre's web site

On inspection, not quite as salacious as it sounded!

1. The shortest sentence in the Bible.

2. A term of exasperation.

3. What He actually said when He visited this web site

Forget the "Best viewed with" icon - it's best viewed with eyes shut, the speakers turned off, and the PC in another room entirely. I think these guys must be on acid or something.

I'd forgotten about Web Sites that Suck: if you are at all interested in web design, then do spend time hunting around there. It is full of priceless (or possibly very cheap) designs and the acerbic commentary is just the ticket. Thanks, Vince!

"We create compelling, emotionally satisfying and above all highly usable interfaces for web, ecommerce, online campaigns, interactive TV and software applications." - from rawww creative agency's web site.

Hmm: are they quite sure about the usable bit? Or is it just me that finds mid grey on sludge hard to read?

To an old fogey like me, their page background is like returning to the 70s - so this week it's last century, dahling!

... of the most jargon crammed into a blog paragraph is:

"GMI is a global IT solutions provider leading the ‘off-shoring’ revolution with its cutting-edge services that provide support and impetus to emerging & established businesses in the areas of IT consulting, product engineering, web portal development, social networking site developmenet [sic], custom software development, web application development and maintenance. With its signature innovative approach to technology solutions, GMI has effectively leveraged the market presence & profitability for clients hailing from backgrounds as diversified as entertainment houses, educational institutions, healthcare industries, financial organizations, travel companies and regional communities, among others."

Take your prize of a gold-plated bull:

http://webapplicationdevelopment.blog.co.uk/

It would have been a whole herd if you hadn't forgotten to shoehorn "paradigm" and "web 2.0" in there as well.

"Technical Author - Contract

Based in Farnborough we are currently recruiting for a technical author who has had experience using Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Illustrator and FrameMaker. Candidates responding to this position will require full understanding of product development life cycle, the ability to re-illiterate technical documentations into basic documents for less technical body's to understand and have experience writing manuals and user guides for mobile phone products." - job ad on JobServe

What a joy - not only a greengrocer's apostrophe, but a neologism that means the exact opposite of what was presumably meant. For Christmas presents there's Mastercard - but re-illiterate: priceless!

They weren't joking when they said they needed a TA!

Thanks to my chum Steve Rickaby for finding this.

I was about to get all hot under the collar when I spotted this pricing on the Amazon web site last Friday!

Did it fool you? Of course, an ‘8’ with a strikethrough looks very like a ‘0’ with a strikethrough at normal screen resolution. Perhaps that’s why, in the good old days, zeroes used to have a diagonal line across them so you could tell the difference. Ah, the days of punched cards and teletypes.

Chorus in the background of "What are you on about, old person?"

From: Mrs Suzzy Howard [suzzyhoward214@mychurch.com]
Subject: I AWAITS YOUR RESPONSE AS SOON AS YOU RECEIVED MESSAGE

YOUR SISTER IN CHRIST
MRS.SUZZY HOWARD

Ms Howard (if such she is) is not only too thick to locate the Caps Lock, but her carefully crafted combination of mangled English, and nauseating appeals to my Christianity, compassion and (anti-?)American  patriotism, is an immediate turn-off. I sincerely wish her (or him) a long slow death from the imaginary disease described above. Or perhaps God will strike her down with a thunderbolt. But I expect he's too busy worrying about blasphemous teddies.

I cannot understand how anyone would be taken in by this gross rubbish! I even got a similar hard luck tale though the post the other day. At least they wasted a stamp rather than my time deleting emails.