“Bill” writes to ask about spam:

Why does spam (and email subjects of spam) have such nonsensical words inserted? I got an e-mail that included: “Colette was at deforestation when that happened baboon. trout at nocturne or even handicapped as in ding”

It has to do with the fact that many anti-spam systems rely on keywords for determining whether an e-mail should be considered spam. These programs assign spam probabilities to each word, so that some words are weighted as more likely to signal spam than others. If the overall e-mail contains a high proportion of spam words, or if it passes a certain threshold of spam words, it is more likely to get trapped in anti-spam filters.

So often, spammers will use programs that insert snippets of random sentences from other sources or other random combinations of benign words. The intent is to end up with an e-mail that is less likely to be flagged as spam.