Wednesday, November 30, 2005
How do you say "gaydar" in Spanish?
I received my first piece of useful spam yesterday.
What's that? "Useful spam" is an oxymoron? Generally I'd agree, but yesterday I received a piece of spam that not only made it through Gmail's spam filter, but also gave me a chuckle and taught me something.
The email claimed to have been generated as a result of my signing up for some website with "gaydar" in its URL. That fact alone was pretty amusing. But it gets better.
The email was entirely in Spanish.
I think it's pretty awesome that there's a Spanish-speaking website out there somewhere devoted to whatever it is that this gaydar site is devoted to (and no, I'm not about to try to find out).
The thing that I liked about the spam, however, was that it taught me some good new Spanish vocabulary. Since it was a registration email, it contained all kinds of technical and computer-related words explaining why the email was generated and how I needed to confirm my registration or else it would automatically expire in a week. (and yes, I'm going to let it expire)
So for the first time since I started using email ten or so years ago, I've received a useful spam message that, quite fortuitously, taught me something that I might not have sought out on my own.
Let's not get carried away celebrating just yet, though, because this email still makes the ratio of useful to useless spam something like 1 to 100 billion.