I Speak Jive

When I wrote about the HighWebEd I mentioned John William''s talk on Agile. He spoke about how the movie Airplane! was filmed in an Agile manner and gave as an example the development of the "jive" scenes.

Apparently the creative team had a script but it wasn't working. The first pair that read for the role, Norman Gibbs and Al White had their owned take. Not only dir the team cast them on the spot and follow their creative lead (hence Agile) but they also apparently apologized to the two actors as the original attempt was so bad compared t what Gibbs and White brought to the table.

Of course, I would be negligent if I didn't mention that the third person to really make the jive sequence was Barbara Billingsley of Leave it to Beaver fame.

So, coming home, I had the Airplane! and the jive scenes in the back of my mind. The other day at home, somehow or other we were chatting about that great American masterpiece, The Muppet Show and of course, the Swedish Chef.

This brought me back the the Encheferizer (live version here).

So how is jive from Airplane! related to The Swedish Chef?

Filters!!!!!!!!

A filter, in this context, is a program that takes data as input, in this case a stream of text. Does some transformation to it and then spits out the transformed text.

Way back, Unix systems had a program called jive that "translated" text into Jive along with other filters including cockney and valspeak which converted text to like, um, Valley Girl speak dontcha know. It was, like, totally tubular. Of course one filter was named chef, known as the encheferizer which translated into Swedish Chef talk.

Over time, the list of filters grew. Some were silly, some fun, and, yes, some were kind of offensive.

(side bar: as I write this bit of history, I just feel as though I've been transported to Doug Peterson's Whatever happened to… posts and feel as though I should write something like: Do you remember using filters? Which ones did you use? etc.)

Anyway, somewhere in here there's the making of some nice class projects but the challenge was how to do the translation. Some things are easy. One filter was the Fudd filter which translated to Elmer Fudd speak. It's easy enough to substitute w for l in a word as Elmer says "Hew wow" instead of "Hello" but it's hard to know if you've got enough translation rules so that your students text will change enough to be entertaining.

Fortunately, I found this repo. It's an implementation of a whole bunch of filters:

austro (Think Ahhnolld), b1ff (a web newbie), brooklyn, butthead (as in Beevis and), chef, cockney, drawl, dubya, fudd, funetak, jethro, jive, kraut, newspeak, pansy, pirate, postmodern, redneck, valspeak, warez

I couldn't get the system to compile but was able to dive into the source code to see the rules. They're in the .l files. All of those files are source for the Lex parser generator but even if you aren't familiar with Lex you should be able to figure out most of the rules.

Some of the translators rely mostly on simple letter substitutions. Fudd is such a filter:

"r"         gtf_printf("w");
"l"         gtf_printf("w");
"qu"        gtf_printf("qw");
"th "       gtf_printf("f ");
"th"        gtf_printf("d");
"n."        gtf_printf("n, uh-hah-hah-hah. ");
"R"         gtf_printf("W");
"L"         gtf_printf("W");
"Qu"        gtf_printf("Qw");
"QU"        gtf_printf("QW");

Dubya, on the other hand goes more with word substitutions:

[Tt]errorist		|
[Oo]sama		|
[Bb]in(-|{WB})[Ll]ad(e|i)n	{ switch(gtf_random(3))
				  {
				  case 0: gtf_puts_case("bad guy"); break;
				  case 1: gtf_puts_case("evildoer"); break;
				  case 2: gtf_puts_case("terrier"); break;
				  }
				}
[Uu]njustified/{NW}	     gtf_puts_case("pre-emptive");
[Cc]ontra/{NW}		     gtf_puts_case("freedom-fighter");
[Un]nder		     gtf_puts_case("misunder"); BEGIN(INW);
[Mm]isunderstand	     gtf_puts_case("misunderestimate"); BEGIN(INW);
[Mm]isunderstood             gtf_puts_case("misunderestimated"); BEGIN(INW);
[Kk]ill/{NW}		     gtf_puts_case("oblitifry");
[Kk]illed/{NW}		     gtf_puts_case("oblitifried");
[Dd]destroy/{NW}	     gtf_puts_case("destructifry");
[Dd]destroyed/{NW}	     gtf_puts_case("destructifried");
[Rr]esonat/{NW}		     gtf_puts_case("resignat");
[Ee]ven(-|{WB})[Hh]anded/{NW} gtf_puts_case("foreign-handed");
[Ee]mbitter		     gtf_puts_case("embetter"); BEGIN(INW);
[Ff]allability/{NW}	     gtf_puts_case("fallacy");
[An]tidote/{NW}		     gtf_puts_case("anecdote");

Some, like chef, pirate, and aust do some of both:

[Tt]h		gtf_puts_case("z");
w		gtf_puts("v");
ou		gtf_puts("u");
"de "		gtf_puts("d ");
"le "		gtf_puts("l ");
"me "		gtf_puts("m ");
"ne "		gtf_puts("n ");
"re "		gtf_puts("r ");
"ve "		gtf_puts("v ");
[Cc]		gtf_puts_case("s");
[Pp]ie		gtf_puts_case("mozer's pie");
[Ss]teak        gtf_puts_case("shnitzel");
[Gg]overnor	gtf_puts_case("govenator");

Some also deal with more complex situations such as only substituting letters if they're at the end of words and the like.

All of this is leading to a huge number lesson and project possibilities from simple text replacements in an intro class to something much more ambitious in a later class.

I was looking to vary some of the things we do in Hunter and I think I'll add some language filters to the mix.

2019-11-08

CS Education