No more nonsense

I have often ranted about the amount of rubbish that accumulates on the Internet. Two pieces of drivel this week reminded me of my deep suspicion of human nature that sees the creation and proliferation of nonsense as an admirable pastime.

The first was an e-mail brainteaser that states: "There are three words in the English language that end in `gry`. One is `angry` and the other is `hungry`. Everyone knows what the third one means and what it stands for. Everyone uses them every day and, if you listened very carefully, I`ve given you the third word. What is it?"

The person who sent me the mail was at her wits` end, having pondered over the puzzle for a considerable period of time. She forwarded it to me, knowing my penchant for word games, in the hope that I would be able to bring her some relief.

I stewed over it for a negligible period, before electing to make sure it wasn`t some silly hoax rather than a genuine puzzle. I paid a visit to Snopes, the urban-legend-busting Web site, and entered a couple of key phrases, and sure enough, my suspicions that the puzzle is a dud were confirmed. There is no other word in common usage that ends in "gry".

There`s far more interesting stuff that`s actually true with which we could clog up our company`s bandwidth.

Georgina Guedes, Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

The researchers at Snopes were pretty thorough, and listed all the archaic words that did end in those three letters, as well as proposing that the brainteaser was originally intended as a verbal puzzle, and that a subtle jumbling of the phrasing would change the meaning entirely. This is what they proposed: "Think of words ending in -GRY. Angry and hungry are two of them. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third word? The word is something that everyone uses every day. If you have listened carefully, I have already told you what it is."

They suggest the first two sentences are red herrings, and that the puzzle really starts at the third sentence. In this instance the third word of "the English language", would be "language", which is something we use every day. This makes much more sense.

What blows my mind is that people out there, unsuccessful in their own attempts to solve the puzzle, forward it to all their friends, who forward it to all of theirs, ad nauseam. Added to this is the instruction at the bottom of the particular version that my friend was working on that if she forwarded it to five friends, the answer would pop up on her screen.

I`ve heard that appealing to e-mail users` compulsive forwarding tendencies is the way in which spammers harvest e-mail addresses, but I don`t buy this, as there is never a guaranteed return path for these addresses. Instead, it seems that in some Andy Kaufman-like show of humour, someone, somewhere along the line has delighted in the prospect that people will forward his rubbish globally.

The second thing that got my head a-shaking was the receipt of a mail, from two different friends, entitled "Let`s pluck our twangers". The link was to a Web site purporting to have the transcripts from a genuine television show from the seventies into which the scriptwriters have injected a little salacious content in the form of sexual innuendos among the characters attempting to hammer pegs into some holes.

While at some level, the language is quite funny, in a toilet humour kind of way, this story is clearly a hoax. The Web developers of the site have even gone so far as to undermine their own statements by adding "maybe" after the initial declaration of the origins of the script. But that doesn`t stop the e-mail forwarding fanatics from purporting that it is a genuine transcript.

This smacks of the "Captain Pugwash" hoax that people still swear blind is true. While Snopes hasn`t included the "twangers" story in its archives yet, it has plenty to say on Captain Pugwash. For the record, there were never characters in that beloved children`s television show called "Roger the Cabin Boy", "Seaman Staines" or "Master Bates". Most notably, the cabin boy`s name was "Tom".

Come on, people. There`s far more interesting stuff that`s actually true with which we could clog up our company`s bandwidth. For instance, any Internet site that furthers the argument that George W Bush is an idiot as we approach the upcoming election, should be lauded and forwarded. Go to www.rumorsontheinternets.com to find out what this leader of the free world understands about technology.