Today I sat down at the computer to see a new IM from a potential new friend. I didn’t recognize the screenname, but that’s not unusual. I considered briefly that it may have been from a spambot, but “mattp204” didn’t seem like a sexbot’s screenname, so I responded. After a couple of lines, however, the…
Tag: language
“Sliding Board” v. “Slide”: Some Notes on the Mid-Atlantic Dialect
When I moved from Philadelphia to Buffalo a handful of years ago, I thought I was pretty prepared for the major dialect differences. Pronunciation-wise, I had steeled myself for the Western New York pronunciation of words like car and crab shack, and I knew I wouldn’t be understood if I asked for a glass of…
Conversations with Spambots, Part 1
(Last week, this was my first post ever on my newish Tumblr account. Then I realized Tumblr doesn’t do what I want it to, so I will probably never use it again. Therefore, I am reposting here.) A few times in the last few months, I’ve received random unsolicited IMs from spam accounts trying to…