While you're here, why not try one of my other sites, CoverTrek for some unusual music trivia?
Disemvowelment
Disemvowelment is - obviously enough - the act of removing the vowels from a passage of text, as well as a pun on the word 'disembowelling'. A number of blogs and websites do this
to offensive text which has been placed in their 'comments' section. This is done to ruin the fun of those who like to have fun by posting offensive rubbish
and by starting fights, while still leaving the text in a form which can be read by anyone who really wants to. As with disembowelling, it's a punishment,
though a rather less drastic one. Some claim that it's a more effective method of supressing internet trolls than simply deleting their abuse.
This technique seems to have originated on Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light weblog - if not invented
there, that's certainly where it became popularised. There are now a few plugins for various blogging tools which allow the automatic disemvowelling of
comments - see the Wikipedia article on disemvowelling for useful links.
This site exists because I couldn't resists the challenge of trying to re-emvowel disemvowelled text. This is a challenging task, as the disemvowelled word
'dg' may well have been 'dog', but also 'dig', 'dug', 'doge', diego' and so on. I have a first cut of this functionality at the
re-emvowel link at the side of the page. A more advanced version is in progress.
To re-emvowel text, cut and paste the disemvowelled text into the window and click on 'Re-emvowel'. You'll be shown an attempt at re-emvoweling, with the
re-emvowelled words in different colours:
- Black text means the program is confident that it found the right answer.
- Red text means the program has no idea what you're talking about.
- Blue text means that the program found a number of possible matches for this word, and is showing you the most likely match.
If you click on a blue word you'll be show a list of alternative possibilities in dark blue. You can click on any of these words to choose it, or you can
click on >> or << to grow or shrink the list of possible matches.
Enjoy - I'll be back with a much improved version - sooner or later.