Assume the inspiration was Emily Wilson's new translation of the Aeneid. I gotta be honest, I'm still not sure how dactylic hexameter is supposed to sound, I've listened to a bunch of videos and haven't figured it out.
I haven't read Wilson, but I've been working my way through Rodney Merrill's Iliad, very slowly, for a year now, and I highly recommend it. Here's a sample: http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/homer/merrilliliad.htm . If that doesn't make it intuitively obvious, I can try to record my interpretation of it and other people can tell me if I'm getting it right.
Thanks. It'll be my next one after Wilson's. I kinda get it more now, although I'm thrown off from time to time, but it does have a really interesting, driving metrical structure that feels like "being urged forward" to me.
It's common for people to say that English tends to be iambic, whereas Greek and Latin allow for more dactyls, so hexameters work better in those languages.
The ending of the line always goes like the "shave-and-a-haircut", and so you could say that the kind of energy you feel in that jingle is also the kind of energy urging you forward in dactylic hexameter.
I'm currently reading the whole Aeneid in Latin with an online group and I feel like I finally "got" the hexameters. My (amazing) high school teacher (30 years ago!?!?) felt he didn't really have time to focus on building up our hexameter intuition, but now that I'm doing it at greater leisure, it's kind of starting to pop out at me. Kudos to Scott for this super-incredibly-constrained poetry; I might have to share it with the group.
Many people have said this! I'm torn between "I guess I wasted my time doing this" and "people seemed to find it beautiful, and I wonder if it's because subconsciously they noticed it was poetry even if they couldn't exactly put their finger on why."
I always loved that about that piece. Especially when the Goddess of Everything Else paraphrases her sister near the end, pointing out how Cancer's tag line was just slightly off-meter all along. Or maybe that part's just in my head, I'm actually unclear. If it's real, it's devious and subtle.
Things like that make be realize how much I read things mentally-aloud, and that this varies a lot more than I usually think about.
Also, when I took Mandarin I was told that most native Chinese speakers don't pronounce words in their head as they read them silently, which I can't confirm but which kinda makes sense for a non-phonetic writing system with lots of homophones.
It's interesting - my memory of it is as a poem, but when I clicked over, I scrolled down to figure out where the poem starts, and I couldn't find it, and only then did I realize that the prose paragraphs actually had meter. I'm not sure why my memory remembered it as a poem!
But also, I'm not sure what it means to be "in dactyls" as opposed to "in anapests" - it looks to me like many of these passages start with an unstressed syllable or two.
> But also, I'm not sure what it means to be "in dactyls" as opposed to "in anapests" - it looks to me like many of these passages start with an unstressed syllable or two.
It's kind of like how you can get a different disassembly for variable-length instruction word machine code if you start at an offset that's not the intended one!
Thank you for the "shave-and-a-haircut" direction. This helped my reading of what was otherwise a jumble of words with a bunch of obtuse slashes immensely.
The (partial) Iliad I like is Christopher Logue's "War Music" - a very loose translation, written by a first-rate poet that makes no attempt to keep the verse of the original, and instead is a great poem in its own right.
And God turned to Apollo, saying:
‘Mousegod, take my Sarpedon out of range
And clarify his wounds with mountain water;
Moisten his body with tinctures of white myrrh
And violet iodine; and when these chrisms dry
Fold him in miniver and lints
That never wear, that never fade,
And call My two blind footmen, Sleep and Death,
To carry him to Lycia by Taurus,
Where, playing stone chimes and tambourines,
The Lycians shall consecrate his death,
Before whose memory the stones shall fade.’
And Apollo took Sarpedon out of range
And clarified his wounds with mountain water;
Moistened his body with tinctures of white myrrh
And violet iodine; and when these chrisms dried
He folded him in miniver and lints
That never wear, that never fade,
And called God’s two blind footmen, Sleep and Death,
Basic unit is the DUMM-dada, but there’s some variation on that, so a typical couple of lines might scan DUMM-dada DUMM-dada DUMM-dada DUMM-dada DUMM-dada DUMM-da/DUMM-DUMM DUMM-dada DUMM-DUMM DUMM-dada DUMM-dada DUMM-da...
I think maybe it’s quite common/standard to have the last dactyl in a line cut short? But I’m remembering Latin lessons from 25 years ago, so...
There are two kinds of feet that are normally used for this meter, the dactyl (LONG short short) and the spondee (LONG LONG). You can mix the two quite a bit, although for epic there should be a total of six.
Conventionally the last two on the line are a dactyl and a spondee, in that order (the "shave and a / haircut"). The last one can also potentially be a trochee (LONG short), particularly because one can't tell the difference as easily at the end of the line.
Apparently classically these are mainly about the actual length of time that the syllable is held (which can also be phonemic in Latin -- it can differentiate words that would otherwise be indistinguishable; I don't remember whether the same is true of ancient Greek), whereas in English equivalents these are mainly about stress (so it's not exactly the same effect).
Thanks, I think I actually get the whole idea of poetic meter for the first time.
I'd always thought it was an arbitrary structure you could impose on pretty much anything; after all, doesn't English naturally have a stress every two or three syllables? But I see now that there's some words you just can't make into spondees, and in natural speech you often go three or even more syllables without a stress.
I've thought more about this in terms of Latin. A lot of the prestigious surviving classical Latin literature is in a very formal meter, and teachers may expect students to learn some facts about it. (Unfortunately, a lot of the students don't necessarily get much aesthetic appreciation of it... that's kind of tricky at that cultural distance sometimes.)
I've heard people recommend Timothy Steele's book *All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing*, which is supposed to be an enjoyable and accessible introduction to how this works in English. I bought it because of those recommendations but haven't actually read it.
Sorry for being too dumb to do DMs. Hi, you must be the Jon I know from school, right? How you doing? Send me a message (perhaps on my blog to avoid cluttering things up here) and say hi!
Ha! Yes!! You know, I saw there was a Phil H on here who was a Chinese translator and was wondering... in fact doing what you just did has been on my to-do list ever since. How’s it going?? Yes, I’ll send you a longer message on your blog (ie substack?)
My high school teacher had us memorize the first eleven lines as one of our first assignments in our Aeneid class thirty years ago. I've repeated them often enough that I still remember them clearly, but unfortunately our teacher, while teaching us the basics of hexameter scansion, didn't ever insist that we recite with proper meter or quantity.
So, my memorized 11 lines, which I feel like I know like the proverbial back of my hand, are memorized *without the meter*!!
I should probably try to fix that, since I'm now rereading the poem and getting the feeling of the meter. It's weird to have to amend such an old memory.
Weirdly, I could try to do the scansion in my head, if I can keep each line fixed as a unit long enough to "go back and forth" over it. Maybe on an upcoming train ride.
I still think the eleventh line is amazing in terms of both the sense of awe and grandeur, and in terms of the ancient Roman religious view: that there are multiple gods, they're imperfect, and they don't all agree with each other.
"impulerit. Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?"
"... she forced him to. Is it really possible that the gods' minds hold such huge hatreds?"
If you've ever read the thing about the 'Journal of Evidence Based Haruspexy', a parody of modern soft-science nonsense, it sounds like that might be what the Romans were actually doing, except they didn't have hilariously bad statistical techniques to add a veneer of legitimacy!
I was lucky enough to learn Latin in the restored pronunciation with the right vowel lengths and the elision and all that, and when I read bits of the Aeneid the meter hits me over the head! It's very hard to imagine saying it out loud without singing it, which apparently the Greeks did but the Romans didn't.
There's a really nice effect where the rhythmic meter and the stress pattern in the words are usually in agreement, but often when Juno is mentioned, the stress pattern will shift, giving it a really weird antagonistic seasick feeling. If you're walking and reading at the same time (which apparently the Romans did) it can put you off your stride.
I was once walking across the common here and there were some scary-looking youngsters listening to rap music, all about drugs and guns and bitches and so on, and suddenly I noticed the same effect, stress pattern going off-beat with the rhythm of the poem.
I stood and listened for a while, and they noticed and asked what I'd stopped for. So I said that there was something going on in the music that was like what this really old Roman poet did, and they were curious so I tried to explain.
Much to my amazement they were fascinated and they got it immediately. It's apparently quite a common technique in modern rap.
“ TRUMP: [interrupting] Ron must mouth word so, upon full turn, word holds form!” I’m confused on how this counts as saying Ron must use a palindromic word in each sentence? or is it just meant to be more evidence the debate was rigged?
Ron [has to say] a word [such that], upon [reversing it], [the] word [has the same] form [ie the word is identical when reversed]. I know, it's not great, but you try defining palindrome without As, Es, or Is.
We could add "symbol for symbol" at the end to make clear that it needs to "hold form" in terms of its constituent letters. "... upon full turn, word holds form, symbol for symbol".
"Why do Ron's words sound so funny? So, Ron must sound out word, but word's symbols from bottom to top must copy symbols from top down! Go topsy-turvy, won't do nought! Such goofy words of Ron's, lol."
Not words plural, Trump is calling out a single word because he is speaking up during Ron's first (incredibly long run-on) sentence. Any other words that seem funny are probably just due to the letter avoidance rule.
I originally read Trump as calling Desantis out for "radar" not being pronounced in such a way that if you slowly turned the tape teeth backwards it would say the same word as réy-dahr carry the palindromic form in reverse audio.
You had us prepped for Trump'd brilliance so I guess I overshot it.
I realized the error when Trump's response wasn't a sentence chock full of words that fit that strict definition.
That last round is the same as the game Cheddar Gorge from the BBC Radio 4 panel game, "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" which may or may not still be running fifty-one years on from the first broadcast.
This is hilarious and I wish the real debates were this entertaining.
I wonder whether I was the only one to read the debate moderator's word, in my head, in Nicholas Parson's voice - and to now have the Minute Waltz playing in my head...
That's fascinating. I wonder if men are more marriagable if they can tell a prospective spouse that their brothers have complicated, hard-to-rhyme names.
Whether or not it genuinely makes men more marriageable (and I hope not; I want to imagine True Love triumphing over the dark forces of nominative determinism) it appears that parents expect that it does so. The mechanism proposed is that parents, wishing not to hinder any future sons' marriage prospects, are biased towards a hard-to-rhyme name for their current son (it being specifically elder sons' names that are taboo). Some thoughts:
1) I wonder whether this keeps the relative popularity of names over time more stable than the "trends" I see in different generations here
2) Gotta name your kids something, and it isn't really any less dignified than naming children after celebrities, geological features, fruit, etc. "That which we call a rose, by any other name..."
3) If it were I, I think a kind of pressure would build up and I would feel an irresistible urge to name my youngest (and therefore rhyme-proof) son something that rhymed with the Pondo equivalent of "yes" or "hello"
If I married a Pondu woman I'd invent a bunch of fictitious long-dead uncles to help me get out of doing chores, like Maundry and Vishes and Rake-Rout-Re-Rarbage.
OK, I wrote a draft forbidden-letter reply for candidate Ron. (Not very challenging to the extent of other forbidden-letter material attributed to Trump in the above debate!) Apology for the potential "culture war in a non-culture-war thread" (which may or may not be a policy on ACX now?).
> I think an urgent problem for America today would be the "woke" people who try to make everything about identity, and particularly minority identity. Children merely trying to learn core language and math get told to think about knowledge and our culture like a form of power or a form of hierarchy that one ought to reject and overthrow. I think they will come out dumber for it in the end. We don't want the people with the duty of teaching our children to inject radical race and gender ideology grounded in conflict. While working in my capacity of chief Florida executive officer, I took the initiative in bringing the fight back to the "woke". I demanded that radical political Critical Race Theory and the like not be taught in public education, and that education be about concrete practical material that each Florida parent ought to be able to agree on. And I got anger directed my way from all over the country for what I did, but I think I know why people got mad: namely that my combative policy HAD A REAL IMPACT in holding back Critical Theory. It HAD AN IMPACT in holding back gender ideology. I am the only candidate with a real record of being able to fight "woke" in the wild: I fought it in Florida and when I am your Chief Executive I will fight it in our whole great nation.
I can't make much sense out of Trump's heroic hexameter lines. Something about Ukraine defeating Russia? And Pluto being Cronus's son? Anyone able to explain?
> Pour’ng / forth out of / Rus’s / rough woods; from / Muscovy’s / boroughs
> Gun-bulky / troops rush / forth on / Korsun’s / uncorrupt / country
Muscovy = Moscow (sort of)
Rus' = historic Slavic polity sort of ancestral to Russia although historically based in Kiev
So, Russian troops laden with guns are invading Korsun's country (assumed to be Ukraine) from the woods of Russia (or alternatively, from hiding places in the woods of Ukraine).
> Just so / Cronus' / son, who / roosts on / lofty O- / lympus
> Puffs up / storm clouds / - so puff'd / up, so / smug Popov's / columns.
An epic simile about Zeus (who is a storm god) raising storms, which are like Popov's troops.
> But ho- / mologous / to long- / shoot’ng / Phöbus’s / sun-glow
> Just so / Korsun’s proud / corps burnt / through your / columns, o / Moscow.
Another epic simile about how the sun (the sun god's light) eventually overcomes and breaks through storms, and in the same way the Ukrainian armies overcome and break through Russian troops' formations.
> Brought to / Cocytus; / turn’d to / bounty for / dolorous / Pluto.
I don't actually know who the "heroes" in the list are, but Cocytus is a reference to (literally a river of) the underworld, and bounty for Pluto is a reference to the god of the underworld who likes to collect things, so these are ways of saying that they died.
> But not ours such / glory; / you, Vo- / lodomyr, / hog boughs of / honor
> Thus our / funds ought / not to sup- / ply you, your / jousts should go / solo.
This is saying that the honor of these achievements should not belong to the United States and that instead it belongs properly to the Ukrainian president, who should correspondingly pursue his war without American funding (perhaps in order to achieve a more objectively impressive triumph?).
Thanks, this helps a lot. I am still pretty confused who Korsun is or why Popov (a 1950s Soviet General? 🤔) is relevant to this, but your explanation is 90% there!
I think “Korson” is a modified spelling of Kherson, which is an oblast (and large city) near Crimea in Ukraine that has been central to much of the fighting over the past year. Alternatively it could be the small township of Korson in east Ukraine, which is not as notable AFAIK.
Sometimes ancient epic poetry refers to people by who their ancestors were, or who founded their cities, or what city they were presumably from. If it's a reference to an older Soviet general, it could be an epic equivalent of calling Americans "Washington's people" or British people "Londoners" or maybe calling the present-day U.S. Army "MacArthur's men" or something. Ancient epics would totally do the equivalents.
Seth did a pretty great job, but just to complete it:
- I feel bad about Korsun, but it was the best I could do - it's the Slavic spelling of Chersonensus, the main city of the Tauric Chersonese, the ancient Greek name for the region. I figured it was as close to an Iliad-epithet for Ukraine as I was going to get. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chersonesus
These are the names of some of the most famous Russian/Soviet generals; the American equivalent would be something like "Grant / Sherman / McArthur / Bradley".
Forgive my explaining the joke, but this is great, because it fits the format but is a typical example of Trump being not even wrong, since that Ukraine is fighting primarily for glory is utterly absurd
OK, so my final scores for this round are that Haley is the AI pretending to be human, Christie is the human being honest about its experience, DeSantis is the human pretending to be an AI, and Trump is the AI being honest about being an AI.
You can buy a famous book "A Void", in which, no word in it, contains fifth symbol of all (thirty minus four) symbols that form words. It is by an author from country that Paris is in. This book is hard to talk about in this format that author did it in.
How to do it and still sound natural? It’s hard, most of all to avoid translating “la” in that snail-munching jargon of “A Void”’s original composition.
Say: "a", "such", "it", "this", "that", "my", "our", "your", "his", "any", "all", "most", "a particular", "a distinct", or always say things with plurals. Although no such trick is a thousand thousandth match for Gallic "la", still all can aid you in your writing.
"Millionth" lacks the symbol, though. But could you think "i" sounds similar to the fifth symbol with a strong linguistic modification of non-consonant mouth sounds?
No, I always think only of orthography, not sound, in writing and appraising lipograms.
Not doing so is tricky, as commonly folks from distinct origins don't find accord on how many sounds our own idiom has! My mom and dad's origins lay in Manhattan and Bronx (so to say), and by my school days my family was living halfway to Boston. For my own intuitions, no pair of any two of
* God's mom, according to Christians (MARY)
* to join in matrimony (MARRY)
* joyous and mirthful (a similar word, in writing)
can sound at all similar. All sound wholly distinct! Similarly
* a tiny magical humanoid (FAIRY)
* a boat for taking you across a bay (a similar word, in writing)
I find distinct as night and day. But a random countryman or countrywoman would, I think, not say so: most find only two (at most) distinct and many in California say this triad indistinguishably!
But orthography is mostly akin apart from words such as "colour" and "harmonisation" (not so many words, all in all). Writing-only lipograms thus "work" from country to country.
I applaud you! Your work in avoiding a fifth glyph astounds! It is not falsity to say that varying word sounds hold no difficulty on writing without a fifth glyph! May millions of humans try this fun discursion into linguistic composition.
Not so hard. In fact an old Wiki¹ fight is about if Wiki should talk about that work in lipogram or non-lipogram format. It was kind of obvious to contributors at first that it was amusing to follow a matching constraint, and naturally such contributors did a good job. But a war of words was to follow. Many said (and I think this opinion won out) that Wiki was not a spot for such sport and frivolity.
In a way this is akin to a primordial Wiki conflict about "Tlön, Uqbar" (a story, originally in Spanish, about a land in which thought has primacy to physics, and thinking of a thing is why that thing is so or is not so). In that story, our narrator talks about this country's truth or untruth: is it truly a spot you can physically visit? I think (following this narration) finally Tlön starts to usurp our world, butting in and making our world bit-by-bit Tlönish. Naturally Wiki authors thought to maintain that fiction, writing that Tlön truly is a physical country and not only an imagining, and that this story is nonfiction. Why is this funny? I think it's that "Tlön, Uqbar" is fiction about a land that starts to burst out of fiction into our world, so Wiki contributors said that particular land was, if you follow, bursting out of fiction into our world.
But it's strictly an untruth to say Tlön is a nonfictional land that you can go to. But it's not an untruth at all to talk about "A Void" following its own constraint. So I don't think our two situations truly match at all. But today I think no such playful Wiki writing will find accord or too much succor if it's caught by a Wikisourpuss.
Anyway... not too long ago I found a particular Wiki discussion of a variant writing constraint (not that of "A Void") in which a contributor artfully hid an illustration or two, without saying so. It was holding on, for now. I want to aid in guarding it, and I think I did so by consigning to oblivion which topic it was (!!), so I can't highlight it for you. But, long may it last... it's truthful and also fun.
¹ Normally I would obviously not call it that. Sorry.
Gallic humor is said to contain lots of satirical, um, gall, and not so much caution about possibly insulting folks as Anglic humor has today. It's possibly a significant cultural gap which also has a part to play in Gallic Wiki's continuation of an official humor tradition along with Anglic Wiki's discontinuation of its old humor portion. I don't know.
I think that "A woman" parody is smart. Thanks for sharing it.
Thanks. It's truly striking if you can do it too and didn't start off with this Anglo-Saxon idiom from infancy. Wordplay in a linguistic community in which you first took part as an adult is a thing worthy of boasting of.
I want to say "think of Vladimir Nabokov, a famous author in his original Russian, and again upon acquiring our idiom and authoring additional books in it", but Wiki says that Nabokov "was trilingual" as a kid, talking and writing in Anglo-Saxon (and Gallic and Russian) with his family.
Still, if you can pun or follow odd constraints using an idiom you didn't grow up with, kudos. My most skillful idiom I didn't grow up with is Brazil's variant of Portugal's idiom and my humor in it isn't usually broad-ranging and natural. I also don't think I could follow this, or any, vocalic lipographic constraint in it!
Seth, we see, eschews the letter E needlessly. He pens messy sentences where we need pretty sentences. He eschews terms we need, e.g. beekeeper, screeched, effervescence, defencelessness. Relent, Seth, we beseech thee, lest every eye be wrecked.
In his mind, this fifth digit is illicit. I think if his wish is inking insights in this stilting writing, it is his right. Fighting him risks instilling ill will.
This is inciting pith, wit; it is inspiring writing which is firing bright lights. Isn't it?
Since you're versed in wiki editing thought, a question, if you don't mind: why does wiki insist on spoiling fiction so early and so eagerly? I can (but won't) name five or six examples where simply reading the first two sentences of a wiki article about a work of fiction will thoroughly spoil that work of fiction. No spoiler tags, no spoiler warnings, and no burying of key plot points far below the top line. Is there policy or prevailing ethos that leads to this, or is it just incidental?
At Wiki's start it was common to mark a plot summary, or plot twist, with a warning. I think at first that folks actually had to click, taking a conscious action, to show a plot summary.
I think that, following that, it was just a warning (but no click), as: if you go on, you may not find this film's plot surprising if you watch it at any point.
But by and by, Wiki authors said: our writing is not fandom, it is scholarship. In scholarship thorough writing (containing maximum amounts of information) is thought good, not so much thinking about what fans want or don't want.
An approach to thinking about this is saying: "It isn't right to say Wiki can contain 'too much' information or that folks will 'know too much' about a topic."
What folks do with this notion is tricky. Many faiths may say that looking at a particular photo (in a wrong situation) is bad; Baha'is, famously, normally say this about Baha'i founding holy man Bahá'u'lláh. That faith tradition holds that you should only look at his photo in a particular holy building in Haifa, not just for fun or just for curiosity. But Wiki found a photo. Wikifights about its inclusion in Wiki's discussion of Bahá'u'lláh found no lasting unity of opinion (up to today). Many say "our Wiki must not uphold any faith tradition that bans information" and many say "but, our Wiki can do a small thing so Baha'is won't look at this photo without wishing to do so!".
To many Wiki authors, doing anything in support of this goal is akin to saying "Baha'i is right" or "aiding Baha'i traditions is important" ... which is not such a scholarly kind of position.
I think plot summary stuff is also thought of in this way (!), in that doing anything so that fans don't find a plot summary without trying is akin to saying "this film is good" or "liking this film is important", which is also, for many, not a scholarly position.
It's many moons ago that I actually had proximity to this stuff; sorry for any flaws in my account.
Not just wiki, film critics always say what occurs in four fifths of a film, avoiding only fifth act twists (Macduff tops king in Scotch play? Suicidal Danish guy, Horatio's oppo, kills Claudius or not? and so on.) It's an annoying obligation to avoid critical appraisals prior to watching a flick.
From a look through that wiki's history, I think it was usually only a "plot summary" chunk that was bound by this constraint. And happily, though that chunk is not as wordy now as it was, that approach is still going on.
But I think I saw many initial assumptions that all discussion of this work (or possibly discussion of Gadsby, not of La Disparition? which could account for part of my confusion on this point!) could or should follow its constraint, too.
OK, I think on Anglic Wiki it's actually an old, traditional fight about analyzing Gadsby this way, and not as much fighting about doing so for Oulipoan works. Gadsby's Talk still shows complaints about two Wiki authors' using constraints in writing about Gadsby, not so long ago. And it's not a particularly young notion.
Sorry for possibly mixing up Gadsby's and La Disparition's Wiki history, and thanks for actually looking at that history.
I also found out that that author's final day was in Ivry, though I think I shouldn't say which Ivry (of almost six options!) in particular.
But Paris is obviously famous and Ivry isn't, so your thought works for practical communication.
(Virgil, according to his obituary, "was born in Mantua; Calabria took him away". It's most common to think of him as originating in his birth town, as in a Victorian work in honor of Virgil which calls him "Mantovano" -- simply Italian for "from, or born in, Mantua". But nobody would call Virgil Calabrian. This also shows how my approach is awkward, but yours is culturally typical.)
- "rough woods; from" and "uncorrupt" and "smug Popov's" are not dactyls
- "to long" and others are hard to read as spondees
- why did you elide "Pouring" and what's going on with "sturdy Kutuzov" and "But not ours such"
- "Cocytus" usually has its stress on the second syllable, as does Sokolov and I think Kutuzov, I think Kozlov and maybe others have their stress at the end
My favorite example of constrained writing is Mike Keith's rewriting of Poe's "The Raven", which begins:
Poe, E. Near a Raven
Midnights so dreary, tired and weary.
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
"This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".
See if you can figure out the constraint before looking it up at http://www.cadaeic.net/naraven.htm. Apologies for not being able to format the line breaks better.
It read like a pretty good metaphor for the content-free nature of the rules of politics, and the incredible frustration even people who want to see roughly the same policy changes must feel when a natural born virtuoso uses their unholy talent to turn the whole thing into... whatever this is depicting.
Not directly related, but the contortions the candidates go to remind me of this programming talk (I promise this is at least interesting until they explain the gimmick and this the point of the talk)
This is the kind of thing I always got the impression SNL made their bones on, but never delivered in the Famous Examples people ended up linking me. Well done. Can't wait to watch the Democratic debate next.
The heroic hexameter is when I decided Scott was using ChatGPT for Trump's responses, but from his comments, it sounds like he did it all with his own brain.
Today’s debate constraints were brought to you by Oulipo, Christian Bök, and listeners like the MAGA choads who will vote for Donald Trump no matter what he says! (And also Monsanto, the Koch brothers (including the dead one), and Cuthulu).
No, Trump explained it. "Why fly-spot-tool word?" Radar is used to spot flying objects. He did get it incredibly quickly, before DeSantis could come up with another word to use. Dumb Ron.
As an interesting biographical note, Albert Ellis, the founder of REBT, an early ancestor to cognitive-behavioral therapy, actually wrote a couple of his books without the 'to be' verb because he thought it would help people see their problems as potentially transitory. The idea was taken from David Bourland as an addition Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics. This was back in the sixties.
So there's kind of a psychology/rationalist avant la lettre connection.
Not exactly. The idea of E-Prime was to avoid saying that anything is anything else - some uses of the copular verb don't do that, and some other phrases do.
Mark myself extremely impressed. Methinks that writing rather humorous, thus Scott Alexander should moderate Republican debates, because oneself thinks they would moderate quite splendidly. (SECOND ROUND CONSTRAINT: Cannot utilize words less than four letters)
Writing while avoiding short words looks simple, however quick experimentation shows otherwise. Adding further constraints requiring additionally eschewing *quadruply*-lettered words raises aforementioned difficulty level considerably. Writing without articles taxes every writer's capabilities.
It was fun (especially the ending), I just wonder if this was inspired by some American political (-discussion) reality, or just a complete joke from the beginning?
This made me laugh harder than anything I've read, seen or heard in weeks.
That was very hilarious!
This is wildly unrealistic. No way Trump actually shows up to a debate.
Hey I was right
The way Trump will inevitably win the Republican primary will be a lot less dignified than this.
God this is so funny
The closing statement section had me in stitches.
Are pity votes real? Like pity dates? Maybe DeSantis gets elected due to everyone feeling so bad for him that we elect him to make him feel better
The Jeb! strategy? I don't see DeSantis managing to compete with Jeb! when it comes to being pitiful.
Assume the inspiration was Emily Wilson's new translation of the Aeneid. I gotta be honest, I'm still not sure how dactylic hexameter is supposed to sound, I've listened to a bunch of videos and haven't figured it out.
I haven't read Wilson, but I've been working my way through Rodney Merrill's Iliad, very slowly, for a year now, and I highly recommend it. Here's a sample: http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/homer/merrilliliad.htm . If that doesn't make it intuitively obvious, I can try to record my interpretation of it and other people can tell me if I'm getting it right.
I've heard John Dolan/Gary Brecher's version of the Iliad is good.
I did read it and I found it highly interesting, especially his interpretation of the gods.
Thanks. It'll be my next one after Wilson's. I kinda get it more now, although I'm thrown off from time to time, but it does have a really interesting, driving metrical structure that feels like "being urged forward" to me.
It's common for people to say that English tends to be iambic, whereas Greek and Latin allow for more dactyls, so hexameters work better in those languages.
The ending of the line always goes like the "shave-and-a-haircut", and so you could say that the kind of energy you feel in that jingle is also the kind of energy urging you forward in dactylic hexameter.
I'm currently reading the whole Aeneid in Latin with an online group and I feel like I finally "got" the hexameters. My (amazing) high school teacher (30 years ago!?!?) felt he didn't really have time to focus on building up our hexameter intuition, but now that I'm doing it at greater leisure, it's kind of starting to pop out at me. Kudos to Scott for this super-incredibly-constrained poetry; I might have to share it with the group.
I've never understood why people think English is bad for dactyls. I really like them and wrote a piece entirely in dactyls once to see what would happen: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/
Oh my gosh. I never realized. Wow.
Wow, I've also read this multiple times and watched the video where someone recites it, but didn't realize.
Is the principle that each individual sentence is a complete dactylic hexameter line?
WOW this has made me think of that post in a new light. Read it at least four times and had no clue.
Many people have said this! I'm torn between "I guess I wasted my time doing this" and "people seemed to find it beautiful, and I wonder if it's because subconsciously they noticed it was poetry even if they couldn't exactly put their finger on why."
I always loved that about that piece. Especially when the Goddess of Everything Else paraphrases her sister near the end, pointing out how Cancer's tag line was just slightly off-meter all along. Or maybe that part's just in my head, I'm actually unclear. If it's real, it's devious and subtle.
Things like that make be realize how much I read things mentally-aloud, and that this varies a lot more than I usually think about.
Also, when I took Mandarin I was told that most native Chinese speakers don't pronounce words in their head as they read them silently, which I can't confirm but which kinda makes sense for a non-phonetic writing system with lots of homophones.
I doubt most English speakers do either - that would make reading very slow. Is subvocalizing while reading that common?
It's interesting - my memory of it is as a poem, but when I clicked over, I scrolled down to figure out where the poem starts, and I couldn't find it, and only then did I realize that the prose paragraphs actually had meter. I'm not sure why my memory remembered it as a poem!
But also, I'm not sure what it means to be "in dactyls" as opposed to "in anapests" - it looks to me like many of these passages start with an unstressed syllable or two.
> But also, I'm not sure what it means to be "in dactyls" as opposed to "in anapests" - it looks to me like many of these passages start with an unstressed syllable or two.
It's kind of like how you can get a different disassembly for variable-length instruction word machine code if you start at an offset that's not the intended one!
Have you ever considered GOEE swag? I would definitely buy that t-shirt.
I didn't know what it was called, but I really liked the poetic pattern in that piece, and kinda tried to copy it for some parts of something I posted on LessWrong a few days ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tQFM9GNsYyAcxwCv4/life-of-gpt
I didn't hold to it for the whole post, but I think it made things a lot more "pretty" feeling. :)
Thank you for the "shave-and-a-haircut" direction. This helped my reading of what was otherwise a jumble of words with a bunch of obtuse slashes immensely.
The (partial) Iliad I like is Christopher Logue's "War Music" - a very loose translation, written by a first-rate poet that makes no attempt to keep the verse of the original, and instead is a great poem in its own right.
And God turned to Apollo, saying:
‘Mousegod, take my Sarpedon out of range
And clarify his wounds with mountain water;
Moisten his body with tinctures of white myrrh
And violet iodine; and when these chrisms dry
Fold him in miniver and lints
That never wear, that never fade,
And call My two blind footmen, Sleep and Death,
To carry him to Lycia by Taurus,
Where, playing stone chimes and tambourines,
The Lycians shall consecrate his death,
Before whose memory the stones shall fade.’
And Apollo took Sarpedon out of range
And clarified his wounds with mountain water;
Moistened his body with tinctures of white myrrh
And violet iodine; and when these chrisms dried
He folded him in miniver and lints
That never wear, that never fade,
And called God’s two blind footmen, Sleep and Death,
Who carried him
Before whose memory the stones shall fade
To Lycia by Taurus.
I'm curious to know how long it took to compose all of that with three major vowels missing from the language.
Basic unit is the DUMM-dada, but there’s some variation on that, so a typical couple of lines might scan DUMM-dada DUMM-dada DUMM-dada DUMM-dada DUMM-dada DUMM-da/DUMM-DUMM DUMM-dada DUMM-DUMM DUMM-dada DUMM-dada DUMM-da...
I think maybe it’s quite common/standard to have the last dactyl in a line cut short? But I’m remembering Latin lessons from 25 years ago, so...
There are two kinds of feet that are normally used for this meter, the dactyl (LONG short short) and the spondee (LONG LONG). You can mix the two quite a bit, although for epic there should be a total of six.
Conventionally the last two on the line are a dactyl and a spondee, in that order (the "shave and a / haircut"). The last one can also potentially be a trochee (LONG short), particularly because one can't tell the difference as easily at the end of the line.
Apparently classically these are mainly about the actual length of time that the syllable is held (which can also be phonemic in Latin -- it can differentiate words that would otherwise be indistinguishable; I don't remember whether the same is true of ancient Greek), whereas in English equivalents these are mainly about stress (so it's not exactly the same effect).
Yes! Spondes and troches! It’s all coming back!
Thanks, I think I actually get the whole idea of poetic meter for the first time.
I'd always thought it was an arbitrary structure you could impose on pretty much anything; after all, doesn't English naturally have a stress every two or three syllables? But I see now that there's some words you just can't make into spondees, and in natural speech you often go three or even more syllables without a stress.
I've thought more about this in terms of Latin. A lot of the prestigious surviving classical Latin literature is in a very formal meter, and teachers may expect students to learn some facts about it. (Unfortunately, a lot of the students don't necessarily get much aesthetic appreciation of it... that's kind of tricky at that cultural distance sometimes.)
I've heard people recommend Timothy Steele's book *All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing*, which is supposed to be an enjoyable and accessible introduction to how this works in English. I bought it because of those recommendations but haven't actually read it.
Sorry for being too dumb to do DMs. Hi, you must be the Jon I know from school, right? How you doing? Send me a message (perhaps on my blog to avoid cluttering things up here) and say hi!
Ha! Yes!! You know, I saw there was a Phil H on here who was a Chinese translator and was wondering... in fact doing what you just did has been on my to-do list ever since. How’s it going?? Yes, I’ll send you a longer message on your blog (ie substack?)
Down in a /deep dark /dell sat an /old cow /munching a /bean stalk
So, it's DUH-duh-duh-DUH-duh (repeats)?
A bit freer than that. Each of the first four can be Long-short-short or Long-Long, and then the last two are Long-short-short / Long-Long.
Latin has long and short vowels, so you get a very musical, rhythmical effect, like the marching of an army.
This is the first line of the Aeneid:
Arma virumque cano troiae qui primus ab oris.
If you say it out loud in a late Republican accent with the right vowel lengths it comes out naturally as:
Ar (ma vi) / rum (que ca) / no troi / ae qui / pri (mu sa) / bo ris
Where each syllable is one beat, except for the bracketed ones which are two syllables squeezed into one beat.
(If you speak music, most notes are crotchets, the bracketed pairs are two quavers)
If you say it while walking, your left leg is hitting the ground on Ar, rum, no, ae, pri, and bo
and your right leg gets (ma vi), (que ca), troi, qui, (mu sa), and ris
My high school teacher had us memorize the first eleven lines as one of our first assignments in our Aeneid class thirty years ago. I've repeated them often enough that I still remember them clearly, but unfortunately our teacher, while teaching us the basics of hexameter scansion, didn't ever insist that we recite with proper meter or quantity.
So, my memorized 11 lines, which I feel like I know like the proverbial back of my hand, are memorized *without the meter*!!
I should probably try to fix that, since I'm now rereading the poem and getting the feeling of the meter. It's weird to have to amend such an old memory.
Weirdly, I could try to do the scansion in my head, if I can keep each line fixed as a unit long enough to "go back and forth" over it. Maybe on an upcoming train ride.
I still think the eleventh line is amazing in terms of both the sense of awe and grandeur, and in terms of the ancient Roman religious view: that there are multiple gods, they're imperfect, and they don't all agree with each other.
"impulerit. Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?"
"... she forced him to. Is it really possible that the gods' minds hold such huge hatreds?"
or we could say
"Even the gods can have grudges like that?"
Bret Devereaux wrote something very good on what ancient religions might have actually felt like and been for. Utterly Alien:
https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/
If you've ever read the thing about the 'Journal of Evidence Based Haruspexy', a parody of modern soft-science nonsense, it sounds like that might be what the Romans were actually doing, except they didn't have hilariously bad statistical techniques to add a veneer of legitimacy!
I was lucky enough to learn Latin in the restored pronunciation with the right vowel lengths and the elision and all that, and when I read bits of the Aeneid the meter hits me over the head! It's very hard to imagine saying it out loud without singing it, which apparently the Greeks did but the Romans didn't.
There's a really nice effect where the rhythmic meter and the stress pattern in the words are usually in agreement, but often when Juno is mentioned, the stress pattern will shift, giving it a really weird antagonistic seasick feeling. If you're walking and reading at the same time (which apparently the Romans did) it can put you off your stride.
I was once walking across the common here and there were some scary-looking youngsters listening to rap music, all about drugs and guns and bitches and so on, and suddenly I noticed the same effect, stress pattern going off-beat with the rhythm of the poem.
I stood and listened for a while, and they noticed and asked what I'd stopped for. So I said that there was something going on in the music that was like what this really old Roman poet did, and they were curious so I tried to explain.
Much to my amazement they were fascinated and they got it immediately. It's apparently quite a common technique in modern rap.
I hope someone does an audio version of this with AI voices.
I'm excited to see what @soloniodEntity does with this for the podcast.
That would be awesome.
“ TRUMP: [interrupting] Ron must mouth word so, upon full turn, word holds form!” I’m confused on how this counts as saying Ron must use a palindromic word in each sentence? or is it just meant to be more evidence the debate was rigged?
Ron [has to say] a word [such that], upon [reversing it], [the] word [has the same] form [ie the word is identical when reversed]. I know, it's not great, but you try defining palindrome without As, Es, or Is.
Sorry—replied before seeing others had done so… @phee… didn’t mean to pile on.
Word run from front to butt copy of word run from butt to front.
Word run from front to butt, *but* copy of word run from butt to front. Good words, though.
thanks for the explanation/reply! and fair point about the difficulty of trying to define palindromes without using A, E or I.
We could add "symbol for symbol" at the end to make clear that it needs to "hold form" in terms of its constituent letters. "... upon full turn, word holds form, symbol for symbol".
"Why do Ron's words sound so funny? So, Ron must sound out word, but word's symbols from bottom to top must copy symbols from top down! Go topsy-turvy, won't do nought! Such goofy words of Ron's, lol."
Not words plural, Trump is calling out a single word because he is speaking up during Ron's first (incredibly long run-on) sentence. Any other words that seem funny are probably just due to the letter avoidance rule.
I originally read Trump as calling Desantis out for "radar" not being pronounced in such a way that if you slowly turned the tape teeth backwards it would say the same word as réy-dahr carry the palindromic form in reverse audio.
You had us prepped for Trump'd brilliance so I guess I overshot it.
I realized the error when Trump's response wasn't a sentence chock full of words that fit that strict definition.
“Upon full turn, words hold form” seems like, “if you read it backwards, the letters still spell valid words”
That’s a description of a palindrome —without violating his own letter restriction.
Genius.
LOL x1000
My tummy throws out lots of howls upon study of Scott's post just now. Fun to look upon, good work!
Good job.
Tha--fuck
I see what you did there.
Laughing my ass off! Someone forward it to Lorne Michaels for SNL.
Last round was gold
That last round is the same as the game Cheddar Gorge from the BBC Radio 4 panel game, "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" which may or may not still be running fifty-one years on from the first broadcast.
This is hilarious and I wish the real debates were this entertaining.
I was thinking more "Just a Minute" on steroids (with Kenneth Williams, also on steroids!)
No hesitation, deviation, or repetition, on some obscure or ridiculous topic.
I’m ded
Didn't Christie and DeSantis fail the one-word rule by saying "motherfucker"?
I'm Trump would be perfectly happy if his Presidency just consisted of him and others saying his name a lot on national TV..
According to George Carlin, "motherfucker" is one word.
I mean, by my recollection that's mostly what Trump's presidency was...
I wonder whether I was the only one to read the debate moderator's word, in my head, in Nicholas Parson's voice - and to now have the Minute Waltz playing in my head...
(Also reminded me a bit of speech restrictions between Pondo tribespeople: https://johnfinnemore.blogspot.com/2009/08/before-you-ask-yes-floyd-is.html )
(Also-also: ha! No idea who any of these people are ('cept Trump) but I was absolutely still laughing aloud by round three..)
That's fascinating. I wonder if men are more marriagable if they can tell a prospective spouse that their brothers have complicated, hard-to-rhyme names.
"Darling, will you marry me? My brother Orange could be the best man.."
That's fine so long as you're nowhere near the Blorenge (a hill in South Wales).
Whether or not it genuinely makes men more marriageable (and I hope not; I want to imagine True Love triumphing over the dark forces of nominative determinism) it appears that parents expect that it does so. The mechanism proposed is that parents, wishing not to hinder any future sons' marriage prospects, are biased towards a hard-to-rhyme name for their current son (it being specifically elder sons' names that are taboo). Some thoughts:
1) I wonder whether this keeps the relative popularity of names over time more stable than the "trends" I see in different generations here
2) Gotta name your kids something, and it isn't really any less dignified than naming children after celebrities, geological features, fruit, etc. "That which we call a rose, by any other name..."
3) If it were I, I think a kind of pressure would build up and I would feel an irresistible urge to name my youngest (and therefore rhyme-proof) son something that rhymed with the Pondo equivalent of "yes" or "hello"
Re point 3: but think of his poor nieces-in-law!
"Did you really name your son Robert Yes Is The Have Can Do?"
"Oh yes, little Bobby Yep Izzie, we call him."
If I married a Pondu woman I'd invent a bunch of fictitious long-dead uncles to help me get out of doing chores, like Maundry and Vishes and Rake-Rout-Re-Rarbage.
2007, last episode of "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" with Humphrey Lyttleton, and the humour as questionable as ever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cae3qpsZiY8
If Donald was in the debates a lot more people would watch. (still not me though)
OK, I wrote a draft forbidden-letter reply for candidate Ron. (Not very challenging to the extent of other forbidden-letter material attributed to Trump in the above debate!) Apology for the potential "culture war in a non-culture-war thread" (which may or may not be a policy on ACX now?).
> I think an urgent problem for America today would be the "woke" people who try to make everything about identity, and particularly minority identity. Children merely trying to learn core language and math get told to think about knowledge and our culture like a form of power or a form of hierarchy that one ought to reject and overthrow. I think they will come out dumber for it in the end. We don't want the people with the duty of teaching our children to inject radical race and gender ideology grounded in conflict. While working in my capacity of chief Florida executive officer, I took the initiative in bringing the fight back to the "woke". I demanded that radical political Critical Race Theory and the like not be taught in public education, and that education be about concrete practical material that each Florida parent ought to be able to agree on. And I got anger directed my way from all over the country for what I did, but I think I know why people got mad: namely that my combative policy HAD A REAL IMPACT in holding back Critical Theory. It HAD AN IMPACT in holding back gender ideology. I am the only candidate with a real record of being able to fight "woke" in the wild: I fought it in Florida and when I am your Chief Executive I will fight it in our whole great nation.
This is pretty good - although why did he say "chief Florida executive officer" instead of "Governor"?
Oop!
Semantically, this is really, really good. Not to boost anything about the message in and of itself, but I think you nailed it here.
I wonder if it dropped fr would we notice it. It would be funny for something like that to happen.
I can't make much sense out of Trump's heroic hexameter lines. Something about Ukraine defeating Russia? And Pluto being Cronus's son? Anyone able to explain?
> Pour’ng / forth out of / Rus’s / rough woods; from / Muscovy’s / boroughs
> Gun-bulky / troops rush / forth on / Korsun’s / uncorrupt / country
Muscovy = Moscow (sort of)
Rus' = historic Slavic polity sort of ancestral to Russia although historically based in Kiev
So, Russian troops laden with guns are invading Korsun's country (assumed to be Ukraine) from the woods of Russia (or alternatively, from hiding places in the woods of Ukraine).
> Just so / Cronus' / son, who / roosts on / lofty O- / lympus
> Puffs up / storm clouds / - so puff'd / up, so / smug Popov's / columns.
An epic simile about Zeus (who is a storm god) raising storms, which are like Popov's troops.
> But ho- / mologous / to long- / shoot’ng / Phöbus’s / sun-glow
> Just so / Korsun’s proud / corps burnt / through your / columns, o / Moscow.
Another epic simile about how the sun (the sun god's light) eventually overcomes and breaks through storms, and in the same way the Ukrainian armies overcome and break through Russian troops' formations.
> Frolov / Sokolov / Tsokov / Kozlov / sturdy Kutuzov
> Brought to / Cocytus; / turn’d to / bounty for / dolorous / Pluto.
I don't actually know who the "heroes" in the list are, but Cocytus is a reference to (literally a river of) the underworld, and bounty for Pluto is a reference to the god of the underworld who likes to collect things, so these are ways of saying that they died.
> But not ours such / glory; / you, Vo- / lodomyr, / hog boughs of / honor
> Thus our / funds ought / not to sup- / ply you, your / jousts should go / solo.
This is saying that the honor of these achievements should not belong to the United States and that instead it belongs properly to the Ukrainian president, who should correspondingly pursue his war without American funding (perhaps in order to achieve a more objectively impressive triumph?).
Thanks, this helps a lot. I am still pretty confused who Korsun is or why Popov (a 1950s Soviet General? 🤔) is relevant to this, but your explanation is 90% there!
Korsun is a place in Ukraine, made famous in WWII for a German moving pocket.
I think “Korson” is a modified spelling of Kherson, which is an oblast (and large city) near Crimea in Ukraine that has been central to much of the fighting over the past year. Alternatively it could be the small township of Korson in east Ukraine, which is not as notable AFAIK.
Sometimes ancient epic poetry refers to people by who their ancestors were, or who founded their cities, or what city they were presumably from. If it's a reference to an older Soviet general, it could be an epic equivalent of calling Americans "Washington's people" or British people "Londoners" or maybe calling the present-day U.S. Army "MacArthur's men" or something. Ancient epics would totally do the equivalents.
Seth did a pretty great job, but just to complete it:
- I feel bad about Korsun, but it was the best I could do - it's the Slavic spelling of Chersonensus, the main city of the Tauric Chersonese, the ancient Greek name for the region. I figured it was as close to an Iliad-epithet for Ukraine as I was going to get. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chersonesus
- There's also a modern Russian General Popov (no relation), who was one of the leaders of the Ukraine invasion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Ivanovich_Popov
Thanks ❤️
> Frolov / Sokolov / Tsokov / Kozlov / sturdy Kutuzov
These are the names of some of the most famous Russian/Soviet generals; the American equivalent would be something like "Grant / Sherman / McArthur / Bradley".
Not quite. They're Russian officers who were killed during the Invasion of Ukraine. (Except for Admiral Sokolov, who is said to still be alive.)
I don't believe Kutuzov was related to the legendary Tsarist Marshal of the same surname.
Forgive my explaining the joke, but this is great, because it fits the format but is a typical example of Trump being not even wrong, since that Ukraine is fighting primarily for glory is utterly absurd
OK, so my final scores for this round are that Haley is the AI pretending to be human, Christie is the human being honest about its experience, DeSantis is the human pretending to be an AI, and Trump is the AI being honest about being an AI.
lol
Now that are f****ing funny
I'm not sure what the second state was supposed to be in the fixed long sentence.
You can buy a famous book "A Void", in which, no word in it, contains fifth symbol of all (thirty minus four) symbols that form words. It is by an author from country that Paris is in. This book is hard to talk about in this format that author did it in.
Truly, a non-trivial task, always to omit that old fifth phonic symbol.
How to do it and still sound natural? It’s hard, most of all to avoid translating “la” in that snail-munching jargon of “A Void”’s original composition.
You show skills at this form of composition, sir!
Say: "a", "such", "it", "this", "that", "my", "our", "your", "his", "any", "all", "most", "a particular", "a distinct", or always say things with plurals. Although no such trick is a thousand thousandth match for Gallic "la", still all can aid you in your writing.
"Millionth" lacks the symbol, though. But could you think "i" sounds similar to the fifth symbol with a strong linguistic modification of non-consonant mouth sounds?
No, I always think only of orthography, not sound, in writing and appraising lipograms.
Not doing so is tricky, as commonly folks from distinct origins don't find accord on how many sounds our own idiom has! My mom and dad's origins lay in Manhattan and Bronx (so to say), and by my school days my family was living halfway to Boston. For my own intuitions, no pair of any two of
* God's mom, according to Christians (MARY)
* to join in matrimony (MARRY)
* joyous and mirthful (a similar word, in writing)
can sound at all similar. All sound wholly distinct! Similarly
* a tiny magical humanoid (FAIRY)
* a boat for taking you across a bay (a similar word, in writing)
I find distinct as night and day. But a random countryman or countrywoman would, I think, not say so: most find only two (at most) distinct and many in California say this triad indistinguishably!
But orthography is mostly akin apart from words such as "colour" and "harmonisation" (not so many words, all in all). Writing-only lipograms thus "work" from country to country.
I applaud you! Your work in avoiding a fifth glyph astounds! It is not falsity to say that varying word sounds hold no difficulty on writing without a fifth glyph! May millions of humans try this fun discursion into linguistic composition.
Not so hard. In fact an old Wiki¹ fight is about if Wiki should talk about that work in lipogram or non-lipogram format. It was kind of obvious to contributors at first that it was amusing to follow a matching constraint, and naturally such contributors did a good job. But a war of words was to follow. Many said (and I think this opinion won out) that Wiki was not a spot for such sport and frivolity.
In a way this is akin to a primordial Wiki conflict about "Tlön, Uqbar" (a story, originally in Spanish, about a land in which thought has primacy to physics, and thinking of a thing is why that thing is so or is not so). In that story, our narrator talks about this country's truth or untruth: is it truly a spot you can physically visit? I think (following this narration) finally Tlön starts to usurp our world, butting in and making our world bit-by-bit Tlönish. Naturally Wiki authors thought to maintain that fiction, writing that Tlön truly is a physical country and not only an imagining, and that this story is nonfiction. Why is this funny? I think it's that "Tlön, Uqbar" is fiction about a land that starts to burst out of fiction into our world, so Wiki contributors said that particular land was, if you follow, bursting out of fiction into our world.
But it's strictly an untruth to say Tlön is a nonfictional land that you can go to. But it's not an untruth at all to talk about "A Void" following its own constraint. So I don't think our two situations truly match at all. But today I think no such playful Wiki writing will find accord or too much succor if it's caught by a Wikisourpuss.
Anyway... not too long ago I found a particular Wiki discussion of a variant writing constraint (not that of "A Void") in which a contributor artfully hid an illustration or two, without saying so. It was holding on, for now. I want to aid in guarding it, and I think I did so by consigning to oblivion which topic it was (!!), so I can't highlight it for you. But, long may it last... it's truthful and also fun.
¹ Normally I would obviously not call it that. Sorry.
I'm not contributing much to Wiki nowadays, so I don't think I can act on your tip, but it's a good thought. I didn't know about that Gallic custom.
Anglic Wiki had a thing known as BJAODN (roughly: Bad Humor And Similar Foolish Stuff That's Split Off). But nowadays it's not in Wiki at all.
https://www.bjaodn.org/
Gallic humor is said to contain lots of satirical, um, gall, and not so much caution about possibly insulting folks as Anglic humor has today. It's possibly a significant cultural gap which also has a part to play in Gallic Wiki's continuation of an official humor tradition along with Anglic Wiki's discontinuation of its old humor portion. I don't know.
I think that "A woman" parody is smart. Thanks for sharing it.
Thanks. It's truly striking if you can do it too and didn't start off with this Anglo-Saxon idiom from infancy. Wordplay in a linguistic community in which you first took part as an adult is a thing worthy of boasting of.
I want to say "think of Vladimir Nabokov, a famous author in his original Russian, and again upon acquiring our idiom and authoring additional books in it", but Wiki says that Nabokov "was trilingual" as a kid, talking and writing in Anglo-Saxon (and Gallic and Russian) with his family.
Still, if you can pun or follow odd constraints using an idiom you didn't grow up with, kudos. My most skillful idiom I didn't grow up with is Brazil's variant of Portugal's idiom and my humor in it isn't usually broad-ranging and natural. I also don't think I could follow this, or any, vocalic lipographic constraint in it!
Wow, you do this so wondrously!
Seth, we see, eschews the letter E needlessly. He pens messy sentences where we need pretty sentences. He eschews terms we need, e.g. beekeeper, screeched, effervescence, defencelessness. Relent, Seth, we beseech thee, lest every eye be wrecked.
But I think I'll find options for all such words I avoid!
* An apiarist; if you want, an apicultural pastoralist.
* Did yowl; did call out shrilly.
* Bubbling; boiling.
* A condition of lacking armor, or of lacking guards; a condition of folks in risky positions.
Sorry.
Well, these terms seem needlessly extended.
Nevertheless, we expected the letter E needed here, yet Seth expresses these terms very well bereft Es. Cheers!
That's cheating, as most of those wyes are vowels
Slyly wry!
In his mind, this fifth digit is illicit. I think if his wish is inking insights in this stilting writing, it is his right. Fighting him risks instilling ill will.
This is inciting pith, wit; it is inspiring writing which is firing bright lights. Isn't it?
Bravo
Thank you, this was a fun read!
Since you're versed in wiki editing thought, a question, if you don't mind: why does wiki insist on spoiling fiction so early and so eagerly? I can (but won't) name five or six examples where simply reading the first two sentences of a wiki article about a work of fiction will thoroughly spoil that work of fiction. No spoiler tags, no spoiler warnings, and no burying of key plot points far below the top line. Is there policy or prevailing ethos that leads to this, or is it just incidental?
Continuing in my lipogrammatic ways:
At Wiki's start it was common to mark a plot summary, or plot twist, with a warning. I think at first that folks actually had to click, taking a conscious action, to show a plot summary.
I think that, following that, it was just a warning (but no click), as: if you go on, you may not find this film's plot surprising if you watch it at any point.
But by and by, Wiki authors said: our writing is not fandom, it is scholarship. In scholarship thorough writing (containing maximum amounts of information) is thought good, not so much thinking about what fans want or don't want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spoiler
This position is akin to a broad opinion that Wiki should not hold back information on account of its making folks glad, sad, or mad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_censored
An approach to thinking about this is saying: "It isn't right to say Wiki can contain 'too much' information or that folks will 'know too much' about a topic."
What folks do with this notion is tricky. Many faiths may say that looking at a particular photo (in a wrong situation) is bad; Baha'is, famously, normally say this about Baha'i founding holy man Bahá'u'lláh. That faith tradition holds that you should only look at his photo in a particular holy building in Haifa, not just for fun or just for curiosity. But Wiki found a photo. Wikifights about its inclusion in Wiki's discussion of Bahá'u'lláh found no lasting unity of opinion (up to today). Many say "our Wiki must not uphold any faith tradition that bans information" and many say "but, our Wiki can do a small thing so Baha'is won't look at this photo without wishing to do so!".
To many Wiki authors, doing anything in support of this goal is akin to saying "Baha'i is right" or "aiding Baha'i traditions is important" ... which is not such a scholarly kind of position.
I think plot summary stuff is also thought of in this way (!), in that doing anything so that fans don't find a plot summary without trying is akin to saying "this film is good" or "liking this film is important", which is also, for many, not a scholarly position.
It's many moons ago that I actually had proximity to this stuff; sorry for any flaws in my account.
Not just wiki, film critics always say what occurs in four fifths of a film, avoiding only fifth act twists (Macduff tops king in Scotch play? Suicidal Danish guy, Horatio's oppo, kills Claudius or not? and so on.) It's an annoying obligation to avoid critical appraisals prior to watching a flick.
From a look through that wiki's history, I think it was usually only a "plot summary" chunk that was bound by this constraint. And happily, though that chunk is not as wordy now as it was, that approach is still going on.
Wow, that's not what I thought, but that's cool.
But I think I saw many initial assumptions that all discussion of this work (or possibly discussion of Gadsby, not of La Disparition? which could account for part of my confusion on this point!) could or should follow its constraint, too.
OK, I think on Anglic Wiki it's actually an old, traditional fight about analyzing Gadsby this way, and not as much fighting about doing so for Oulipoan works. Gadsby's Talk still shows complaints about two Wiki authors' using constraints in writing about Gadsby, not so long ago. And it's not a particularly young notion.
Sorry for possibly mixing up Gadsby's and La Disparition's Wiki history, and thanks for actually looking at that history.
> It is by an author from country that Paris is in.
You could simply say that A Void's author was born in Paris.
I also found out that that author's final day was in Ivry, though I think I shouldn't say which Ivry (of almost six options!) in particular.
But Paris is obviously famous and Ivry isn't, so your thought works for practical communication.
(Virgil, according to his obituary, "was born in Mantua; Calabria took him away". It's most common to think of him as originating in his birth town, as in a Victorian work in honor of Virgil which calls him "Mantovano" -- simply Italian for "from, or born in, Mantua". But nobody would call Virgil Calabrian. This also shows how my approach is awkward, but yours is culturally typical.)
Alas, so soon!
"A Void" is even more of an achievement in French where "e" is by far the most common letter.
To be honest, the book is rather unreadable as a consequence.
A++++
THAT is the content we come here for. Hooray.
Does your verse scan?
- "rough woods; from" and "uncorrupt" and "smug Popov's" are not dactyls
- "to long" and others are hard to read as spondees
- why did you elide "Pouring" and what's going on with "sturdy Kutuzov" and "But not ours such"
- "Cocytus" usually has its stress on the second syllable, as does Sokolov and I think Kutuzov, I think Kozlov and maybe others have their stress at the end
The elision in "pour'ng" and a few other words is just because he can't use the letter i.
Sokolov, at least, should have emphasis on the first syllable, I believe.
No, Arjun is correct, stress on the last syllable. English speakers routinely mispronounce these last names.
Laughed out loud several times, amazing!
My favorite example of constrained writing is Mike Keith's rewriting of Poe's "The Raven", which begins:
Poe, E. Near a Raven
Midnights so dreary, tired and weary.
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
"This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".
See if you can figure out the constraint before looking it up at http://www.cadaeic.net/naraven.htm. Apologies for not being able to format the line breaks better.
He's not allowed to use the letter x!
Edit: looked it up. So close.
How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
Yes, a true, a great rejoinder to vexing query!
I think the 'nevermore nevermore nevermore nevermore nevermore nevermore' gives it away.
Love the idea of an OuliPOTUS
I prefer the ones with actual hardball questions because those questions were genuinely brilliant.
Yep. As much as I'm a sucker for epic meter, I prefer political comedy to have political content and this was pretty light on that metric.
It read like a pretty good metaphor for the content-free nature of the rules of politics, and the incredible frustration even people who want to see roughly the same policy changes must feel when a natural born virtuoso uses their unholy talent to turn the whole thing into... whatever this is depicting.
which questions?
From the 2016 and 2020 cycles respectively. Both are excellent.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/16/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/05/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate-2020/
<Every GOP candidate wakes up in a cold sweat>
"I just had the scariest dream..."
I made a mistake by reading this at work.
TrumpGPT?
This is very funny. I shared it with friends. Do you see whether and through what media your posts are shared?
Not directly related, but the contortions the candidates go to remind me of this programming talk (I promise this is at least interesting until they explain the gimmick and this the point of the talk)
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf
This is the kind of thing I always got the impression SNL made their bones on, but never delivered in the Famous Examples people ended up linking me. Well done. Can't wait to watch the Democratic debate next.
"Whose Line Is It Anyway" is the one to watch
Very impressive! How long did it take you to write this? The trump heroic hexameter in particular?
The heroic hexameter is when I decided Scott was using ChatGPT for Trump's responses, but from his comments, it sounds like he did it all with his own brain.
Today’s debate constraints were brought to you by Oulipo, Christian Bök, and listeners like the MAGA choads who will vote for Donald Trump no matter what he says! (And also Monsanto, the Koch brothers (including the dead one), and Cuthulu).
Could DeSantis have used "a" or "I" as the palindromic word?
Even I didn't get which of his words was supposed to be a palindrome so it was probably I.
No, Trump explained it. "Why fly-spot-tool word?" Radar is used to spot flying objects. He did get it incredibly quickly, before DeSantis could come up with another word to use. Dumb Ron.
The palindrome word he used was "radar". I don't think he said "I" unless we don't count the contraction "I'm" as a single word.
I completely, utterly lost it when Trump began speaking in the heroic hexameter.
As an interesting biographical note, Albert Ellis, the founder of REBT, an early ancestor to cognitive-behavioral therapy, actually wrote a couple of his books without the 'to be' verb because he thought it would help people see their problems as potentially transitory. The idea was taken from David Bourland as an addition Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics. This was back in the sixties.
So there's kind of a psychology/rationalist avant la lettre connection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
Not exactly. The idea of E-Prime was to avoid saying that anything is anything else - some uses of the copular verb don't do that, and some other phrases do.
And now, welcome to another edition of "Whose Primary is it Anyways!" A game where the questions are made up but the international conflicts are real.
Mark myself extremely impressed. Methinks that writing rather humorous, thus Scott Alexander should moderate Republican debates, because oneself thinks they would moderate quite splendidly. (SECOND ROUND CONSTRAINT: Cannot utilize words less than four letters)
Impressive!
Writing while avoiding short words looks simple, however quick experimentation shows otherwise. Adding further constraints requiring additionally eschewing *quadruply*-lettered words raises aforementioned difficulty level considerably. Writing without articles taxes every writer's capabilities.
Hilarious challenge, resisting threshold incrementation proved impossible. Alexandrian comment sections provide entertainment reliably <=:--)
Writing without utilizing shortened lettered clumping extremely difficult because shorter fillers proliferate throughout everyday verbalized communication.
Avoiding diminutive lexicons creates minimally-readable sentences. Expanding shortest wording simply requires maximally obtuse vocabulary.
Hillarious! Especially early on when Trump weirdly sounds like Trump.
Was it a deliberate or accidental irony that DeSantis's anti-woke rant was derailed by the woke version of fairness?
I laughed way harder at this than I expected to. Well done.
Weirdly this made me feel affectionate toward Trump
Hysterical. Once the Trump parts started I could not stop cackling.
I don't know what the heck this is trying to say about any of the candidates, and I don't care.
Wordsmithery in Action! Loved this
hilarious 🤣
where's ramaswamy and scott though?
It was fun (especially the ending), I just wonder if this was inspired by some American political (-discussion) reality, or just a complete joke from the beginning?
Priceless. The first rounds were funny, but the closing statements were priceless!
It occurs to me some here might be interested in my (non-lipogrammatical) write-up of the modern lipogram:
https://stephenfrug.substack.com/p/a-field-guide-to-the-modern-lipogram
I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. There are tears in my eyes! Bravo, sir. Bravo! Somebody please make a deep fake of this.
Tom Friedman could learn a lot from this piece.
I love this idea. Awesome. Let's apply it to the Democrat debates as well.
I'm sure Joe will hold up well under constraints involving heroic hexameter.
Wait... there aren't any debates Demokratikos? But... how can that be?
I cannot believe I did not see this at the time! I saw the title and thought it was actual serious boring policy stuff. Like, a drag.
The madrigal round at the end achieves Stoppardian levels of comedic absurdity.
Maybe retitle this, "NikSantisly and Christistern are Dead"