Dissociated Press


Dissociated Press

[Play on "Associated Press"; perhaps inspired by a referencein the 1949 Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Up, Doc?"] Analgorithm for transforming any text into potentially humorousgarbage even more efficiently than by passing it through amarketroid. The algorithm starts by printing any Nconsecutive words (or letters) in the text. Then at everystep it searches for any random occurrence in the originaltext of the last N words (or letters) already printed and thenprints the next word or letter. Emacs has a handy commandfor this. Here is a short example of word-based DissociatedPress applied to an earlier version of the Jargon File:

wart: A small, crocky feature that sticks out ofan array (C has no checks for this). This is relativelybenign and easy to spot if the phrase is bent so as to benot worth paying attention to the medium in question.

Here is a short example of letter-based Dissociated Pressapplied to the same source:

window sysIWYG: A bit was named aften /bee't*/ preferto use the other guy's re, especially in every cast achuckle on neithout getting into useful informash speechmakes removing a featuring a move or usage actualabstractionsidered interj. Indeed spectace logic or problem!

A hackish idle pastime is to apply letter-based DissociatedPress to a random body of text and vgrep the output in hopesof finding an interesting new word. (In the precedingexample, "window sysIWYG" and "informash" show some promise.)Iterated applications of Dissociated Press usually yieldbetter results. Similar techniques called "travestygenerators" have been employed with considerable satiricaleffect to the utterances of Usenet flamers; see pseudo.