strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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May 12 05: king lear (or, how I spent monday morning; or, the inherent dangers of being a lexically-inclined smartass)
It all started with this BoingBoing article about some folks who are composing a limerick dictionary: one entry for each word in the OED. Only it won’t be, because the legal department at Oxford University Press contacted them to express their disapproval. The project has been streamlined somewhat as a result: now it’s just one limerick for each word in the English language.
I contacted a friend who works on the OED, who replied:
I carry no torch for “our lawyers”, whoever they are. I suspect people will get bored with limericks before they get far into B. (Apart from which, has anyone worked out what to do with words like honorificabilitudinity?)
Pish, I says.
Honorificabilitu-
Dinity is something that you
Are wont to display
If you spend your day
Showing la morale et la vertu.
I mean, duh. What would you have done? His reply came back about three minutes later.
OK. How about “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”?
The problem here is that once you’ve started down this particular road, one cannot dive into the ditch without sacrificing a great deal of dignity. So I rolled up my sleeves and pretended I didn’t have a job to do and ultimately produced this:
SUPERCALIFRAG (One would think
This sort of thing tickles me pink)
ILISTICEX (but)
PIAL (for this, what)
IDOCIOUS (you owe me’s “a drink.”)I think I just injured myself.
Less merciful types would have thrown something else at me at this point, like that really really long word purported to describe a disease found among miners, but not our P–-. The sole reason for this show of kindness was probably that the workday in the UK had ended by that point, and he’d gone home. Whatever. I lucked out. Thank god we weren’t talking about sestinas, or double dactyls.
Here’s what I want to know, though: how come I can bang these out at my desk with a maniacal grin on my face and a song in my heart, whereas anytime I try to sit down and write stories the whole world turns blue-white with panic and suddenly I’m curled up in a ball on the sofa watching Changing Rooms? Maybe what I should be doing is exploring ways to create an epic-verse form of the limerick for scientifictional use.