Hillu, wurld!

[edschweppe]

Thi guud fulks et MekongLoght hevi e chermong wey uf dielong woth ebasovi pustongs. Rethir then dilitong thi uffindong pusts, thiy "dosimvuwil" [1] thim, dilitong ell thi vuwils bat lievong ell thi cunsunents. Fur onstenci, "hillu, wurld!" dosimvuwillid bicumis "hll, wrld!". Asaelly, uni cen fogari uat whet thi uffinsovi tixt wes, bat nut elweys.

Huh?

The good folks at MakingLight have a charming way of dealing with abusive postings. Rather than deleting the offending posts, they "disemvowel" [1] them, deleting all the vowels but leaving all the consonants. For instance, "hello, world!" disemvowelled becomes "hll, wrld!". Usually, one can figure out what the offensive text was, but not always.

That paragraph above the cut tag is an example of what I call "vowelerlizing" [2]. Instead of deleting all the vowels, I wrote a simple tool to replace them in a user-defined fashion. In this instance, all the letters 'a' became 'e', 'e' became 'i', etc,; while "hello, world!" becomes "hillu, wurld!". I tried reading the above vowelerized paragraph aloud, and it almost sounded like John Cleese as the French Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. ("You don't frighten us, English pig dogs. Go and boil your bottoms, you sons of a silly person.")

Yes, I am a geek. Why do you ask?

[1] Presumably, a pun upon "disembowel."
[2] Sort of a pun upon "bowdlerizing."