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Boredom is just another word for nothing to say

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Why you can trust SCMP
David Wilson

When I am bored out of my mind and then some, I have two remedies. The first is to drink so much coffee that I start to shake and hallucinate. The second is to play with those time-killing, word-spewing online oddities: language generators.

My favourite is the Dialectizer (rinkworks.com/dialect/), a redneck lingo generator. I have never actually met a real redneck. My closest encounter came when I once saw a couple of beefy, bearded blokes in a jeep sporting a Confederate flag in the Castro district of San Francisco. Perhaps they were merely making a butch fashion statement.

But I bet that rednecks talk just as the Dialectizer makes out, if at less length. Either way, the Dialectizer is quite slick - like that easy option for dodgy linguists, Babelfish, it translates a webpage once you feed it the address.

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I offer scmp.com. A property headline degenerates into a torrid procession of mangled nouns and apostrophes: 'Click har fo' th' latess residential transackshuns info'mashun fo' Hong Kong islan', Kowloon an' Noo Territo'ies.'

For no apparent reason my first name morphs into Abner.

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In the interests of balance, I scour for a politically correct online generator that will change 'girl' to 'pre-woman', 'ugly' to 'under-attractive' and 'redneck' to 'rustically inclined', for example.

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