Jive filter

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An encheferized Wikipedia article
An encheferized Wikipedia article

Jive, also known as the Jive Filter (or Jingo Induced Vernacular Extrapolator), is a novelty program that converts plain English to a comic dialect known as jive--a parody of African American speech popularized in the movie Airplane!. Some versions of the filter were adapted to parody other forms of English speech, such as Noo Yawk, valspeak, cockney, geordie, Pig Latin, and even Swedish Chef. The latter form is sometimes known as the "Encheferator" or "Encheferizer". This family of programs became quite popular in the late 1980s.

The original program was very simple and has been duplicated or translated many times on many different programming platforms and many different forms, for instance as a CGI application to run on a website to translate text typed by visitors into a comic dialect.

The program in its classic form is a simple filter that performs text substitution on its input stream to produce an output form. For instance "black" (when preceded by a space) is always translated to "brother" and "come" when surrounded by spaces is always translated to "mosey on down". Later versions of the program added more sophisticated parsing rules that dealt with sound-based translations (as opposed to simple word substitutions).

The original author of the jive filter was Clement T. Cole (in the early 1980's, a grad student at UC Berkeley), and it was heavily modified by Daniel V. Klein (then at Carnegie Mellon), who also wrote the cockney and Noo Yawk filters. While working on his Masters, Clem had seen the movie Airplane!, and had heard one of his professors (an Australian) discuss jive as a non-Australian dialect (who also noted how when American's say "I'm American" it can sound like "I'm a merkin" to an Australian listener). The jive filter resulted from this confluence of observations (and was originally an offshoot of an automated computer assembly language translation system). Clem emailed a copy to Dan, who performed a major rewrite and made the filter much "smarter", improving its performance and increasing its vocabulary. For example, the original version simply translated "throw" into "t'row", but that rule was generalized to include other words. Similarly, instead of translating "other" into "utha", the rule was generalized to handle "mutha", "brutha", etc.

The close to the first chapter of jive was that Clem translated his final Master's thesis into jive and submitted it for review. His advisor, who had read and commented on numerous earlier drafts, simply signed the final copy for approval without reading it. Clem was tempted to submit the jived version for posterity (as it would be part of the UC Berkeley library archives), but relented and submitted a cleartext version instead.

Although distributed through various back-channels and emails, the earliest documented "public" appearance was when it was submitted to the USENET group net.sources in September, 1986 by a (pseudonymous?) contributor from JPL called Adams Douglas, (an obvious homage to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author, Douglas Adams). He resubmitted it to mod.sources.games in April of 1987. This version is still downloadable from archives of that group and still compiles and runs on Unix and Linux. The program was discussed in net.sources in March, 1986 and was apparently quite well known. In 1999, it was used as a model for a final project for Masters level English by Jennifer Hammond at the University of Maryland.

[edit] Borking

At one stage of the Scientology internet wars of the mid-1990s, some opponents of the church's fight to pursue unauthorized publishing of some of its scriptures using copyright and trade secret law adopted the ruse of publishing copies that had first been garbled, "borked", or "borkified", by passing them through the Jive filter or the encheferizer. The holder of the copyright on the church's scriptures Religious Technology Center, sued in some cases, for instance in Scientology versus Zenon Panoussis (Stockholm, 1998). Samples of the scriptures translated in this way were submitted in evidence. The defendants claimed that this was parody; the plaintiffs, violation of copyright.

[edit] External links

Internet Portal
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