Posted by Remy Porter

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/linguistic-perls

A long time ago, Joey made some extra bucks doing technical support for the neighbors. It was usually easy work, and honestly was more about being a member of the community than anything else.

This meant Joey got to spend time with Ernest. Ernest was a retiree with a professorial manner, complete with horn-rimmed glasses and a sweater vest. Ernest volunteered at the local church, was known for his daily walks around the neighborhood, and was a generally beloved older neighbor.

Ernest had been working on transfering his music collection- a mix of CDs and records- onto his computer. He had run into a problem, and reached out to Joey for help.

"Usually," Ernest explained, "I can get one of the kids from the local university to help me out. But with the holiday break and all…"

No problem for Joey. He went over to Ernest's, sat down at the computer, and powered it up. The desktop appeared, and in the typical older user fashion, it was covered with icons. What was unusual was the names of the files and folders. Things like titwank. Or cockrot.pl and penis.pl. A few were named as racial slurs.

Clearly, the college students Ernest usually hired were having a laugh at the man's expense. That must be it. Joey glanced around the room, trying to think about how to explain this, when he noticed the bookshelf.

The first few books were guides on how to program in Perl. Sandwiched between them was Rogers Profanisaurous, a dictionary of profanity. Then a collection of comedy CDs by Kevin Bloody Wilson, the performer of such comedy songs as "I Gave Up Wanking," "The Pubic Hair Song," and "Dick on Her Mind".

"Ah, yes," Ernest said, "you'll need to pardon my desktop. Before I retired, I was a linguist, and I think you can guess what my speciality was."

"Profanity?"

"Profanity indeed. Now, I was hoping I could get someone to take a look at swallow.pl for me…"

Joey writes:

I always thought of Perl as an arcane language here here instead it has somehow been turned into a profane language.

Usually, profanity is what we use when reading Perl.

For whatever reason I seem to have kept this particular file. I must have taken it home to work on. I now consider it an art piece worthy of printing out and framing on the wall.

I think there is something to that, Joey, but I have to be honest: I'm not going to present the entire file in its true glory, because well, there are limits to the sorts of profanity we run on the site. But it's still worth sharing a few snippets:

We can start with some variable initializations:

    my @wankoid;
	my $wankoff;
	open(SHIT,"discindex.htm");
	@wankoid=<SHIT>;
	$wankoff=join("",@wankoid);
	my @toss=split(/\nLabel\:/,$wankoff);
	my $cockrot=0;

Or perhaps some regex matching:

    $swallow=~s/\/\/.*//;
    $swallow=~s/^L:\\//;
    $swallow=~s/\r//;

my @penis=split(/\\/,$swallow);

Uh… could we not?

    for($i=0;$i<$#penis-1;$i++)
    {
        $rude=$curse[1];
        %dirk=%$rude;;

        if(!exists($dirk{$penis[$i]}))
        {
            $dirk{$penis[$i]}=[($penis[$i],[{}],[{}])];
        }

        $rude=$dirk{$penis[$i]};
        @curse=@$rude;
    }

Wait… is "dirk" slang for something I don't know about?

There are a few other words in here that I don't recognize as profanity, like flk, plip, disind, baf, and tot. And SEE? SEE is profanity? How? Are these profane words I just don't know? I mean, Ernest was a professional profanologist, and I'm just an amateur. Clearly I have a lot to learn.

If you know what those mean, leave a comment. If you don't know what they mean, but want to make up an answer, I dunno… leave a comment too?

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https://thedailywtf.com/articles/linguistic-perls