For those of you who read the Atlantic Monthly, you know about the "Word Court" column at the end of every issues where grammar questions and new words are discussed... anyway, I emailed a definition of the word "sporgery" to the writer, and this is what I got.

My letter:

Recently I visited a Scientology criticism newsgroup, alt.religion.scientology. It seems that critics of the cult have had trouble with Scientologists using computer scripts to replace their posts with meaningless gibberish. They call these posts "sporgeries", a combination of spam and forgery, I suppose. This "sporge" used to be just random letters, but as the cult members gained in skill, they replaced words in the posts with words that were the same part of speech. The result was grammatically correct nonsense, quite interesting to read. I wondered if you had heard of this word before, and whether it was coined on alt.religion.scientology or has its origins in an earlier place.

Thank you,
<me>

Thanks. The word is news to me. But trying to discover exactly where a word was first used is a pretty thankless task. Very rarely does the coiner of the word point out that he or she is using it *here* for the first time, and without that, one can never be sure.

Regards,
Barbara Wallraff

Lianna Skywalker
The Media Vaccination Kit
http://freespeech.org/liannaskywalker/clams.htm