Menstruation and the Origins of Culture

That's the title of the thesis submitted by Chris Knight for his PhD at the University College, London, which was later published as a book by Yale University Press. Chris is a professor of Anthropology at the University of East London and a founding member of the Radical Anthropology Group. This thesis presents and tests a new theory of human cultural origins, and forms an interesting read. I've already downloaded it and have started digging my teeth into the 530-page tome.

Christopher Denis Knight mentions in his 32-page CV that he worked as a postman/van driver for the Post Office before studying anthropology. His list of publications counts at 43 now, 12 of which were jointly authored. His thesis was a reconsideration of early twentieth French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's work on symbolism and truth, and no, that's not the cloth manufacturer.

With that overdose of trivia, let me come to the point. The aforementioned thesis is in .doc format, has been 'reviewed' the MS-Word way, and is available only on the author's official website. It has a reviewed spelling error correcting protohumen to protohuman. So, when I run a google search for protohumen, that is the single place on the world-wide-web (Ok, before I mention that a thousand times on this blog) referring the word. Answers.com does not find the word either, but gives Google reference to the same Word document, still abiding by the Googlewhack rules of having a link to answers.com for each word.



Add one of the 7,114 distinct words from the document (out of a total of 185,108 words) and run a Google search, and you have a googlewhack! The whack engine is smart enough and does not let you record whacks with the same word more than if you use it excessively, four times in an hour, but technically you have plenty of whacks for you unless someone else picks up.

So this is another loophole in whacking. There are now four ways to record whacks:

Method 1 :

• Find a pair of words resulting in zero Google search results.
• Create a web page with the two words.
• Wait for your page to get indexed by Googlebot.
• Record your whack on the stack as soon as it appears on Google results.
• I used my previous post to record my first whack using this method:
           triskaidekaphobia dancegoers

Method 2 :

• Find a single word that gives a single search result on Google, and gives a link for definition on the right. I believe you can only get non-existent words this way.
• Scan that document for distinct words (Ping me for the java application I wrote to get the above count of 7,114). You can do a few hundreds manually too.
• Club those distinct words with the master word, one at a time, and record four whacks, after which you wouldn't be allowed.
• Come back after an hour a couple of days to use the same 'uniwhack' again.
• I whacked the following using this hack:
           sexual protohumen
           traditional protohumen
           protohumen cosmology
           coherent protohumen
           peasanties forestry
           peasanties oblivion
           peasanties scourge
           ragged bildungsromen
           bildungsromen emerald
           bildungsromen asses
           bildungsromen kush

Method 3 :

• Try pairs of words from already existing whacks, you have many combinations possible; they've already recorded 610,000 whacks, out of which the latest 2,000 are visible.
• I 'copied' to record these couple of couples:
           spreadably outcry
           insidious spreadably

Method 0 :

• Try pairs of rare, unrelated words (opposites are related; unrelated words would be from entirely different spheres). This is the actual intention of whacking.
• I could do a few couples this old-fashioned way too:
           linguaphiles endoderm
           linguaphiles pachyderm
           lactic linguaphiles

I am sure there are some other cheats you can discover to find whacks. I am done with my share of whacking, and none of the methods I mentioned above would work for the words I have in my whacks as soon as Googlebot crawls and indexes this page.

Triskaidekaphobic Dancegoers

Well, I am neither afraid of 13 nor do I go attend dances, and I do not know anyone with similar tendencies, but this does look a whacky title for a post written to introduce the words Triskaidekaphobia and Dancegoers on the same webpage. Why did I need to do so? To record a GoogleWhack in the Whack Stack.

From the official website, a Googlewhack is that elusive query(two words-no quote marks), that returns a single, solitary result. There are three rules to it:

1. both of the terms must exist in Google's list of legitimate words on answers.com,
2. a Google search on the words without quotes should return "Results 1 - 1 of (any number)", and
3. the two words should not be merely a part of a wordlist.

I tried a few couples of words but could not find a whack, and soon lost patience. Finding two words that occur only once together on the world-wide-web was not an easy task. I instead realised that finding a pair that does not exist at all might be easy, and I can create a page including both the words, and as soon as google indexes that page, I'll be able to record a whack, without breaking any of the rules.

So here I am, with this post. There is no other page on the web that has these two words. Let us hope I am able to record one this easy way. It is not difficult the normal way either. Why don't you too try and log one? Its fun!