From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An encheferized Wikipedia article
Jive, also known as the Jive Filter, is a
novelty computer program that converts plain
English to a comic dialect known as "jive", a parody of African American
Vernacular English. Some versions of the filter were adapted to
parody other forms of English speech, such as valspeak, cockney, geordie, Pig Latin, and even the 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 program is 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".
The original author of the jive filter (and its sister, the
valspeak filter) is unknown. Its earliest known appearance was when
it was submitted to the USENET group net.sources in September, 1986
by a contributor from JPL called Adams Douglas, who was not the
author of the program (an obvious homage to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
author, Douglas
Adams). He resubmitted it to mod.sources.games in April 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.
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.
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