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From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: spell bug?????
Message-ID: <944@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 8-Aug-87 21:36:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: bsu-cs.944
Posted: Sat Aug  8 21:36:54 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Aug-87 13:11:41 EDT
References: <541@augusta.UUCP> <6257@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 27

In article <6257@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) 
writes:
>In article <541@augusta.UUCP> bs@augusta.UUCP (Burch Seymour) writes:
>>I've tried these on two
>>manufacturer's Unix systems and gotten the same result, so I don't think
>>it's a local bug (Sun and Gould are the two if anyone is curious).
>>Three of the words which are passed through by spell are:
>> vfppvdu, plbpvhb, and nbclowd
>
>/usr/5bin/spell on BRL Gould systems rejects these as misspelled.
>Possibly your /usr/bin/spell is not hashing correctly.

I gave those three words to 4.3BSD `spell` and it accepted them as
legal.  However, it flagged "burch", "seymour", "doug", "gwyn", and
"gould" as misspellings :-).

Purely speculative possibility:

A good way of preserving a copyright on collections of items that
individually cannot be copyrighted is to include a few red herrings
that could not be there by chance.  Vendors of mailing lists thus
include a few otherwise unknown addresses.  Similarly, I've heard that
dictionaries include a few authentic-sounding nonsense words that were
created by the publisher.  Theft of the collection can then be proven
more easily.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  {ihnp4,seismo}!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi