Sunday’s upgrade to WordPress 1.5 has made spam comments a lot easier to deal with. Lately, quite a few of the latter have contained a simple two-word message: tool die. My first thought on seeing one was that there’s a missing copulative: not that I have any intention of checking, but surely the sender is advertising “tool and die” products? My second thought was that there’s a missing comma: taking ‘tool’ as a vocative and ‘die’ as an imperative would express my thoughts about the sender with some precision. Of course, before I upgraded my spam-obliterating capabilities, these thoughts were more likely to include copulative imperatives.