PT Distorter

The PT Distorter was a tool that messed with English-language web pages. You would request a specific page, and the Distorter served it back to you with a few minor changes. It used a public domain English word list to randomly pick words to replace. The Distorter didn't read any syntax — it only looked for words on the webpage that appeared in its word list. If a word was found, the Distorter would randomly pick another word in the same word class to replace it. Since some words may appear in several word classes, sentences did not always end up as correct English (although mostly, they did!). Results were often pretty amusing.

The Distorter is no longer active. It was written in Rebol and ran for several years on an earlier version of this server. Some of its favourite targets were:

• A definition of the verb to distort
• An english language slovak newspaper
• The BBC
• Fox News
• The Oprah Winfrey Show
• HBO: The Sopranos home page
• Drudge Report
• The Sun (although some people claimed they didn't spot the difference)
• Ode on a Grecian Urn (a poem by John Keats)