Retro Yakking

As regular readers of this website might notice, Harry Yack is a fan of collecting unfathomable and slightly out-of-the-ordinary ReCaptcha entry prompts. You’ll have seen these if ever you’ve tried to leave a comment here or many other weblogs spread across the vast expanse of margarine that is the world wide web.

You might have read a previous post regarding this very subject, in which I complain about how half the time it just makes up words from existing ones, such as ‘criblastic’ or ‘heedless’. Other times, the word is a completely indecipherable mess of vaguely letter-like forms you’re sure you don’t even have a keyboard button for.

Well, maybe the complaints were a bit over the top and largely fabricated for entertainment purposes, it is slightly annoying when you have to reload the page for a new ‘challenge’, as the program itself puts it. That wastes precious time, especially if you’re still on a dialup connection, where time equals money.

But word verification is often more comedic than frustrating. Every so often you get a word wholly appropriate for the individual post, like ‘carless fool’ for a recent article on Jeremy Clarkson, or a simply unpronounceable foreign loan word such as ‘beaudougementing’. Well, I’ll admit that I made that one up just now, but I think it gives a fair representation of the kind of stuff you find from time to time.

Here’s just a few examples I’ve found in the past week whilst answering comments on this site and some others as well.

After much consideration, I have reached the conclusion that the first word here is ‘pressing’, though for ages I really did think it said something much ruder. As for the second word, I still haven’t a clue who or what ‘arnulfo’ is, though I’ve satisfied myself with the explanation that it’s probably a location in the Canary Islands or something. “Type the two words”, eh? Don’t you mean “type the two mangled series of letters that pass for words?”

I find this amusing because I am a fan of Steve Coogan, a Mancunian comedian you may have seen in I’m Alan Partridge and other such classic comedy shows. Further than that, it conjures images of an Irish President of the United States, which really would be something.

A final one from Blogger.com now, actually encountered whilst perusing Unfortunate Names yesterday afternoon.

“Type the characters you see in the picture above”. Well, John Prescott and Gordon Brown spring to mind.

Right, I’m now off to eat my pressed arnulfo sandwiches. Classy, eh? Try it yourself - making up words in the name of Internet security.

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