Pappings

Have you ever wondered where they come up with the words on those "word verification" screens? You know, those things when you want to leave a comment, or make a purchase online. Some kind of security thing. I'm not really sure how it works and why making it wavy and sometimes really hard to read somehow makes it safe? Is the computer trying to see what you are typing, so by making it wavy and small you may be able to trick the computer long enough for you to type the phrase into the box before it sees you?

At any rate, I'm not so much concerned about what it is or what it does, than I am amused about the words themselves. Who comes up with these? Here are few I've recently come across: Pappings. Flure. Rasmenti. Taramiffuse. Reflesse. Avilingerd. Pstingst. Jane Flossing. And my favorite, Bobbling In.

Are there some kind of computer techies pulling off late nights either totally bombed or high on weed coming up with these phrases? Did they have Tiramisu for dessert that night, and somehow over the course of the night they came up with Taramiffuse? Were they watching a German movie and instead of Avante Guard came up with Avilingerd? Did they look over to see their co-worker Jane flossing her teeth? What the heck is Pstingst? And Bobbling In? Now that is just such a cute and funny phrase, however I completely understand that I am probably the only person that thinks so. In fact, I may be the only person to have come up in my mind with some sort of reasoning for these terms. And somehow in my mind I think that there are real people behind the generation of these terms.

Below is one explanation I found for them:

Please enter the words you see in the box, in order and separated by a space. Doing so helps prevent automated programs from abusing this service.
If you are not sure what the words are, either enter your best guess or click the reload button next to the distorted words.
Visually impaired users can click the audio button to hear a set of words that can be entered instead of the visual challenge.

Helping the WorldOne Word at a Time
By entering the words in the box, you are also helping to digitize texts that were written before the computer age. The words that you see were taken directly from old texts that are being scanned and stored in digital format in order to preserve them and make them more accessible to the world. Since some of the words in these texts are difficult for computers to process, we are using the results of your efforts to help decipher them.

What?? If you respond to this posting, you will more than likely have to type in a word verification. If so, share what it is!