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The most impressive linguistic feat I’ve ever seen
- curiousfab 5y agoComposing such texts is an art form indeed, and really hard. Amazing achievement. Once in a while when composing an email, the first three lines or so just happen to have exactly the same length. I always take this as a challenge to continue this style for the remaining lines (no cheating with white spaces) and I have wasted (?) hours on this in the past.
- jdmoreira 5y agoThis could have been easily done in software and it probably was
- clouddrover 5y agoFrom the guide's FAQ: 03. What program did you use to justify the text? None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor.
- tgv 5y agoWhich software?
- jart 5y agoI don't think it exists. Perhaps we should create it. I manually justify paragraphs of monospace text the exact same way all the time, for my code and git commits. It's an added cognitive burden that should ideally be automated by M-q in Emacs or something. With WordNet we can get a good thesaurus for permuting words. Combine that with CMUDict and IsleDict and we can even reshape the text into something like iambic pentameter.
- tgv 5y agoA thesaurus won't work. There are not many true synonyms around; often, synonyms change the meaning of the word, or interact with the meaning of the context. You also need to change inflections, word order, prepositions, and sometimes the sentence and discourse structure to make a good fit, while maintaining the consistency of vocabulary and readability throughout the current context. It's quite a complex task.
- ramphastidae 5y agoQuite the hyperbole. The author even points out how this was done without realizing it — purposefully misspelling certain words to get the right character counts.
- loxias 5y agoExactly. It might be impressive if it's consistent, or if the number of misspellings is rare. But starting off with a correctly spelt document and then achieving justification by conditionally removing a letter is... not that hard. Ought to be possible to test this hypothesis (is the justification done by conditional misspellings?) with some simple scripting. edit: however, it appears that's not what the author did.
- rawling 5y agoJust read the first paragraph of story and... I can't see any misspellings. (Pasting here, the spellcheck points out Samus, Aran, Metroid and "molted", which I thought was OK.) (E: ok, "futher" for "further".) A couple of missed words or odd linguistic choices, but compared to the number of lines, not many. The one specific misspelling that the tweeter points out is consistent throughout.
- loxias 5y agoI was curious so I did the requisite short bit of scripting. I think you're right, the misspellings are independent. For a few words (like "begining") the text contains the correct and a misspelt word. But for most misspelt words ("carefull" for example) the text contains only the misspelling. Thus, the text being fully justified is independent of the misspelling.
- ataru 5y agoI think it could have been written in something like MS-DOS edit, which doesn't have a spell check feature anywhere in sight. So it never saw a spell checker, they didn't have too much awareness of the errors. Maybe they also didn't care about spelling too much - thinking up words that fit in the spaces is fun but correcting spelling errors isn't much fun. The document being an in depth write up of Super Metroid probably also says something about the person's character!
- eesmith 5y agoMichael Hart, of Project Gutenberg fame, was known for this style, only, without typos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_S._Hart#Writing_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_S._Hart#Writing_style
- jhanschoo 5y agoThis is really impressive, but not really unusual. Poets have written epics under more severe constraints.
- clippablematt 5y agoReminds me of Gadsby, where the author wrote an entire novel without the letter e. Even more impressive is others have translated it into other languages, still without the e. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
- littlestymaar 5y agoLikewas, thirty years later George Perec wrote La disparition[1] which is also devoid of the letter "e", and was also translated to multiple languages with similar constraints (with some variants, the Spanish version for instance is written without "a"). [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void
- dhosek 5y agoIn the Perec instance, it's what was called by the Oulipo group (of which he was a part), a Lipogram. Perec wrote a follow-up text in which the only vowel used was e. A Canadian author wrote a suite of five novellas each restricting themselves to a single vowel. In his case, he went through a dictionary by hand and created vocabulary lists for each novella. I've read the English translation of La disparition and I'd note that (a) the act of translating a Lipogram is kind of its own special challenge (which might be also why the Spanish version chose to omit a instead of e—without e, a wide class of plurals and all third-person forms of to be are lost, although a rules out most feminine nouns) and (2) the writer/translator ends up building a vocabulary of standard circumlocution to avoid the forbidden letter, e.g., “this/that man” in place of “he.”
- kitd 5y ago"Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn is in a similar vein. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Minnow_Pea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Minnow_Pea
- jyriand 5y agoThere are also books written in an E-Prime english. In E-Prime you can't use any form of "to be"(is, are etc.). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
- hadlock 5y agoPlease downvote me, but it's super ironic that someone is writing about "impressive linguistic feats" in a multipart tweet. I can't wait for this fad to die out and be replaced by something that supports long form blogging. Maybe I'm just getting old. Every time I see this kind of thing it just amazes me that we ripped right past blogging, and straight to tweeting. Multipart tweeting, to me, is the ultimate antithesis of a linguistic feat.
- _Microft 5y agoYes, they could put that on a blog. It would be cool if visitors on the blog could comment there to interact with the author. Maybe not just at the end but on every paragraph or sentence of their articles, wherever it makes most sense for the comment. Not having to host the blog oneself would take friction out of the process and allow a lot more people to participate, so maybe that's also wanted. While we are at it, an API would be great, since some people might like to automatically collect the content and reformat it to their needs. Somebody make this, please.
- klohto 5y agoDo we have to have this comment on every single twitter post? Jesus, we get it, you don’t like threads, get over it. Either use a workaround so it outputs blog-like post or don’t read it. But for the love of god, stop complaining about. Every. Single. Post.
- chrismorgan 5y agoI regularly wordsmith comments in my column-constrained code (e.g. 100 columns) for prettiness—I don’t like to have just one or two words on the last line of a multi-line comment, so I will normally fiddle things to get that last line either empty or a bit fuller. I will just about always do this if it’s a single line plus a word or two. I also definitely enjoy occasionally indulging in the style of perfect line-filling this submission is talking about; but even when I don’t go to the trouble of filling lines, I regularly tweak line break positions to balance line lengths and to start sentences or phrases at new lines. This style of craftsmanship, embracing constraints and optimising for beauty or even whimsy, is something that is sadly often not possible now with the diverse presentation media we employ: in the past we would adapt the medium and presentation to the content, but we’ve shifted to mostly adapting the content and presentation to the medium. A paper book had static presentation, and so you could tweak things to your heart’s desire; and if someone had bad eyesight, you could produce a larger version of it while keeping everything else intact, if you desired. One particularly good example of that is static paginations of certain Bible translations; for example, the KJV has a couple of extremely popular paginations, so that one person may have a small Bible with tiny text and another a large Bible with wide margins and large text, but they’ll still turn the page at the same time. (This can lead to church services where most of the audience turns the page during a reading of scripture at the same time!) But in a digital world, your content needs to adapt to display on devices both tiny and huge, and you will have limited control of its presentation. Static layout like this Super Metroid guide no longer works: at 73 columns wide, it’s too small for display on portrait phone screens without introducing scrolling (awful), additional wrapping (ugly) or reflowing (losing the craftsmanship, and impossible to do fully automatically anyway). Responsive design is all about embracing the fact that you don’t know the medium, and working with that. And yes, it lets you do some nice previously-impossible stuff and work better on a diverse range of devices, but it also loses something. I once noticed, part way through writing an essay in school, that I had started the last three lines with the letter w; I ran with it and made every line for the rest of the essay start with the letter w. I could go on to talk of a great many more things where we’ve lost something over the techniques of old due to low-quality computerisation of something formerly done by experts; but also that better computerised alternatives are often available which claw back some or most of the deficit, typically by more deliberately attempting to imitate what the experts did rather than doing the easiest thing; greedy line-breaking is nigh ubiquitous, but there is also Knuth-Plass; most computerised music engraving is fairly atrocious, but LilyPond exists.
- jakear 5y agoI remember doing this with some homework assignments back in college, the very many filler words available in English make it pretty easy. The linked text uses copious fillers and doesn’t even maintain the same width across paragraphs.
- tromp 5y agoThis linguistic feat also applies to code. For my 2012 IOCCC entry [1], I spent many many hours tweaking the syntax and ordering of code to get the uniform looking layout. Which I ended up doing many times over every time I found a way to shorten the code. One can play with the total height, width of the arms, and height of the arms, to try to get back to uniformity. I expect many other IOCCC authors have had similar experiences. [1] https://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/tromp.c https://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/tromp.c
- Koffiepoeder 5y agoI looked closer into this IOCCC entry, and must say I am very deeply impressed. For those wondering, I would recommend the accompanying article [1] as a starting point. [1] https://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html https://www.ioccc.org/2012/tromp/hint.html
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dietrichepp 5y agoDid this for my wedding invitation. Kept rewording it and changing punctuation until everything lined up near perfectly. I suspect that there are tons of people who worked in marketing or communications who have done this throughout the years. Especially back in the 80s and earlier, when text-heavy marketing was in fashion.
- mseepgood 5y agoWait until he discovers Shakespeare, where every line is written in Iambic pentameter.
- washadjeffmad 5y agoI believe that was actually the style of his Belgian cousin, Schuddespeer.
- dash2 5y agoOr Georges Perec.
- marcodave 5y agoOr Dante's "Commedia" where each line contains 11 syllables in triplets, that rhyme in chain for 100 chapters, for 4711 triplets
- prvc 5y agoNamely, that the following text employs word choices such that it forms justified blocks without having either added extra spaces or hyphenated words across lines: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs/10114 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs...
- huhtenberg 5y agoThanks. The title and the whole tweet-train is a pure click-bait.
- rawling 5y agoIt does at least give you a chance to see whether you can spot it for yourself.
- _moof 5y agoSeriously. This is almost a genre at this point. Hysterically demanding rapt attention just to take an entire paragraph to say something that takes one sentence. It drives me crazy. I put it in the same bin as the scourge of 8-minute how-to videos that could be three bullet points and a diagram. "Whoa, this is nuts: This Super Metroid walkthrough has monospace text that is manually justified through WORD CHOICE ALONE. [link]" There. Was that so hard? And they still get to yell.
- tangus 5y agoThis was a fad in my local BBS around 1995. Not to these extremes, of course, but for a couple of months that year we'd justify our forum messages to the 72nd column without any extra space. It's not too difficult, lines have enough words that there's always something you can change. After a while, as you approach the right margin, you can feel whether the rest of the sentence will fit, and you rephrase it as you write. I see OP more as a feat of tenacity than of brilliance.
- twic 5y agoThis doesn't seem all that far from the art of writing tweets which are exactly 280 characters. Start by writing what you mean straightforwardly, then go back and edit it down. First restructure sentences, then replace words, then elide grammatical words, then juggle punctuation.
- jtbayly 5y agoNow try doing thousands of them consecutively.
- OJFord 5y agoExtremely tedious (IMO), but totally possible if I for some reason wanted to. I've often had a long tweet (it's often an effective customer support avenue, but the character limit isn't conducive to conveying detail..) but as GP says, it's just a case of writing what you want and then whittling it down with a bit of rewording/rephrasing/abbreviation. Thousands consecutively would 'just' take thousands of times longer, it'd be O(n), I just don't have any desire to do that, it's not fun for me.
- btilly 5y agoI did the same thing on Usenet around the same time period. I was surprised at how easy it was, actually.
- bshimmin 5y ago
- Arech 5y ago> The best, most delicious part is that untold thousands (tens of? hundreds of?) of people will have read it during the past two decades, and NONE OF THEM CAN SEE IT! Because they don't care? Why should they?
- Arech 5y agoHey downvoter, would you mind to explain? I genuinely don't understand why I or anyone else should care if some person wasted a lot of time on formatting a text to paragraph boundaries. Is it forbidden to ask such questions here?
- notRobot 5y agoThis is hacker news. People come here to read about other people doing cool/impressive stuff just because they can. Not because they have to. Plus, time enjoyed is never time wasted, and clearly the author of the guide had a lot of fun with this.
- Arech 5y agoWell, I have nothing against that. I just wondered why they are surprised that others don't find it so interesting? And bearing in mind that I may miss something I asked for clarifications. Should I be hated for that enough to be kicked out of the community (b/c that's what basically downvotes do)?
- jl6 5y agoI didn’t downvote you, but your comment was probably downvoted because it comes across as rude and dismissive and somewhat like a teenager trying to impress a crowd with how cool he is for not caring.
- Arech 5y agoI'm not a native English speaker, so I'm not qualified enough to counter that, you may know better. But didn't the thing that is was a question not a statement change something in the reasoning?
- stavros 5y agoUnrolled: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1441497498573545478.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1441497498573545478.html
- joeberon 5y agoI think this is the most made-up, arrogant comments I've seen on a post that haven't even taken a glance at the actual content. People all over asserting that it is has been done in special software, that there's typos everywhere, that there's double spaces all over the places, when none of it is true. I have to say I'm quite surprised at the number of totally certain and easily disprovable assumptions people on here and on the twitter thread are making.
- notRobot 5y agoWelcome to the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment. The scary thing is that many readers will also often take anything said confidently enough to be fact. This is also basically how a lot of disinformation works. Say it authoritatively, and you'll become an authority on the matter to many people. I've definitely been guilty of doing both of these things past, but I've learned now to actually read and think and do research before commenting or taking something I read at face-value.
- ArchStanton 5y ago>It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment. C'est la vie. The internet allows millions of people to opine on barstools. It might simply be that our standards for the written word were too high before as it required a large investment to write/print/distribute a magazine or book.
- mistermann 5y ago> C'est la vie. The internet allows millions of people to opine on barstools. It may be interesting if there was a social media platform that exerted some sophisticated control over the manner in which this phenomenon plays out. If adequately successful, the way "la vie" is, would then be different.
- thih9 5y agoThe title seems a bit of a clickbait. For those that don’t want to click: It’s a plain text guide to Super Metroid, manually justified via word choice.
- 65 5y agoYeah, there's really no need for a long Twitter thread about some minor detail that can be summed up in one tweet. It takes the author six tweets to get to the explanation. Like, get on with it, already.
- throwawayay02 5y agoWell... it's not that impressive is it, specially if achieved by mispelling. It's laborious sure, but... For instance 16th century poet Luís Vaz de Camões wrote a wonderfully written Homeric poem of +1000 stanzas of 8 lines with the exact same rhyme scheme. That is a much more impressive and unatainable feat by 99.9999% of the population.
- jack_riminton 5y agoI genuinely don't think it's that impressive, you just write a line to say something and add, subtract or change some words to fit. Painstaking yes, most impressive linguistic feat? no
- saurik 5y agoOMG I didn't realize other people had this affliction (I consider it a horrible OCD-like issue as I find myself often unable to send messages in editors that start to give me control over "squareness"): all of my tweets are the maximum length, all of my git commit messages are 50 characters, I gave a text-heavy talk a few years ago in a monospace font so every slide had a ton of bullet points that were all the same number of characters, and I often write messages where every line is the same length (I have linked a couple examples that are easy for me to link to off the top of my head). https://libzip.org/libzip-discuss/msg00669.html https://libzip.org/libzip-discuss/msg00669.html http://svn.saurik.com/repos/menes/trunk/document/interface.tcl http://svn.saurik.com/repos/menes/trunk/document/interface.t... I have never done this to anything as long as that manual (partly as I simply both don't let myself type things that are that long in a monospace presentation font and also try very hard to resist the temptation to ever, under any circumstance, manually word wrap text).
- aasasd 5y agoI see you haven't yet caught the coding version of that. E.g. http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/oopscode.c http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/oopscode.c (From http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/oops.html http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/oops.html)
- 4gotunameagain 5y agoWhy would you do this to him!
- alpaca128 5y agoImpressive, but very difficult to read in some places. I am definitely a fan of aligning similar lines, from equal signs to columns of numbers and variables; in the right dosage I find it helpful for readability, but your linked example also shows the problems when you overdo it. I think I should be glad that I rarely write long texts in monospaced fonts. I can't unsee that perfectly aligned game guide.
- thangalin 5y agoYou're definitely not alone. In the following prose, I tried to minimize the number of non-natural hyphens, reduce excessive spaces between words, and ensure that each section fills all three columns entirely: https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf
- dejongh 5y agoWonderful
- arh68 5y agoFWIW, the Laravel source code has a prominent pattern to it, (comments, anyways) which is nice, for example /* |-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Application Timezone |-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Here you may specify the default timezone for your application, which | will be used by the PHP date and date-time functions. We have gone | ahead and set this to a sensible default for you out of the box. | */ [1] https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/8.x/config/app.php https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/8.x/config/app.php
- rohitpaulk 5y agoA similar example: in Laravel's codebase, every line in a doc block is 3 characters shorter than the line above it. Example: https://github.com/illuminate/database/blob/master/Eloquent/Model.php https://github.com/illuminate/database/blob/master/Eloquent/...
- jawnv6 5y agoIt's impressive but in practice, as a guide, it's very difficult to use. There is one path to follow with no overall map or routing to skip things. So to use it to figure out one tricky section often means reading 4 extra paragraphs just to find a landmark and trace from there to where you're stuck before you can follow along.
- svilen_dobrev 5y agowww.vogue.com/3241115/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961/ When someone can write, they just.. can. We mere mortals, only read, in awe..
- rags2riches 5y agoText blocks like this was a thing in a BBS-style forum I used in the nineties. There were topics where all posts were expected to be in block form. They would also turn up in other topics here and there.
- candlemas 5y agoOne of my math professors told us about his friend in graduate school who could justify his papers on the fly. Maybe it's easy for some people.
- kthejoker2 5y agoI won't claim it's more or less impressive, but Luis Antin van Rooten's Mots D'Heures is at first glance abstract (bordering on the nonsensical) French poetry .. But is actually a homophonic translation of English nursery rhymes - that is, if you read the French aloud, it sounds as if you're reading the rhyme. Example: Un petit d'un petit S'étonne aux Halles Un petit d'un petit Ah! degrés te fallent Indolent qui ne sort cesse Indolent qui ne se mène Qu'importe un petit d'un petit Tout Gai de Reguennes. (If you read it aloud you will recognize a well-known scrambled egg...) The effort is in making the French poetry make any sense, which van Rooten (a Hollywood character actor in his spare time) does admirably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d%27Heures?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mots_d%27Heures?wprov=sfla1
- projectileboy 5y agoWow!! I had to go to the Wikipedia page to fully appreciate it. Thank you for sharing that.
- barbs 5y agoThere was an old flash animation that did a similar thing with a Japanese rap using English words https://youtu.be/VCOEh_Dnkeg https://youtu.be/VCOEh_Dnkeg
- kortex 5y agoAh yes, animutation. This was peak meme culture back in the early aughts. Mmm, tasty nostalgia. What's interesting about internet meme culture (back then and to this day) is that it's quite Dadaist. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animutation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animutation
- baby 5y agoOh gosh, there's a all wiki full of that https://wiki.animutationportal.com/Super_Smash_Bros._Animutation https://wiki.animutationportal.com/Super_Smash_Bros._Animuta...
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- f0e4c2f7 5y ago> One who thinks that the word ‘missiles’ is spelled “missles”, but a Mozart nonetheless. Maybe he had to create a typo here or there to keep things fully justified.
- rawling 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651245
- acuozzo 5y agoOnce upon a time I suffered from severe OCD. I fully justified all of my code comments in C to 80 columns by word choice. No extra spaces. No random hyphenation. You feel pain while you're doing it, but you can't stop. I'm glad therapy helped me.
- klyrs 5y agoI don't think I have ocd but this is something that I do without thought. Usually, I'll catch myself after a minute or two. But if a paragraph is almost there, it becomes difficult to work with that paragraph on-screen until I scratch the itch.
- effingwewt 5y agoYea, we uaed to have to do this as an exercise in my public school English class, is that not a thing anymore? It's cool, to be sure, and Ive actually used the guide over the years, long before they were sold to Cnet/gamespot. I really miss the old gamefaqs, some truly amazing finds and collaborations happened there, before it all became a C/P fest with re-hashed and re-mixed same guides over and over again. Or just info/pics pasted from other sites. The ASCII art that was uaed and consigned back in the day was killer too. I guess I'm just an Old Randy Marsh now, 'all this new stuff is crap warble warble!'
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoI don't know. Translating haikus across languages so that they remain haikus of equivalent meaning and beauty seems vastly more impressive.
- booleandilemma 5y agoI find it remarkable and astounding that someone was able to spend multiple tweets explaining what the author “accomplished”. Really, scarily, stunningly? When words are used this way they lose their meanings. And the comparison to Mozart? My God. How insulting to the compsoser. Clearly, this guy hasn’t seen much.
- shp0ngle 5y agoI recently discovered Super Metroid on the SNES emulator in Nintendo Switch. The game is so good! Compared to the other games in the emulator library, it’s like night and day. I have no idea about other games in 1994, and how does it compare. Doom is one year earlier and it’s much more advanced, so, who knows.
- TillE 5y agoSuper Metroid is, improbably, still one of the best "metroidvanias" ever made. The best, in my opinion. If you use the randomizers that people have developed in recent years, it's infinitely replayable. It helps that it was among the later SNES games, so developers had more time to learn the hardware. Chrono Trigger (1995) is also one of the platform's best, most polished titles.
- wnoise 5y agoNot just randomizers, but mashed-up randomizers: https://samus.link https://samus.link
- dhosek 5y agoI remember doing this by accident in an email back in the days in which all interactions with a computer were in monospace (on a 80x24 terminal screen). Fiddling with margins to make it work is kind of cheating (and curiously, it seems to be easier with narrower line lengths than wider ones). Doing it for an extended period of time with consistent margins is a real challenge.
- nullc 5y agoIt's easier than the author appears to suspect. I wrote all my status reports for work, commit comments, and quite a few emails in 'monospace full-just' for many years. I'm not sure why I stopped doing it habitually, though I still do it sometimes when I notice my messages naturally came out close to it. It may be just due to using the web more often, which seldom displays text with a monospace font. I don't recall anyone ever noticing, nor did I expect them to. Seeing another commenter mention BBSes in the mid-90s, perhaps that is where I picked up the practice. The metroid text seems to change width periodically in varrious blocks, which is also a property of the monospace-full-just text that I wrote.
- seshagiric 5y agoI read the first few pages and no doubt it is an enjoyable read. If I had any interest in the game, I would have read the full thing. But there is no reason why if the same text would not have been any better without graphics and more styling? Is this confirmation bias? the moment someone makes a claim of excellence, or genius, instantly number of people realize "how it hit them"!!
- roryokane 5y agoThe guide was last updated in 2001. At that time, GameFAQs only allowed plain text guides to be uploaded. The guide's author did not choose to write manually fully justified plain text instead of rich text with graphics – they chose to write manually fully justified plain text instead of left justified plain text.
- link0ff 5y agoAh perfectionism, I do this all the time picking such words to align a word with its opposite word on the previous line (for example, an old name vs a new name to be able to compare them visually when they are aligned). This improves readability. Actually this is not hard to do.
- chris_st 5y agoThis is truly impressive. The most impressive linguistic feat I've ever seen was on a Mastodon, which was named for the French writing group "Oulipo", whose members did work with constrained language. The work from this group you've most likely heard of (if you've heard of them at all) is George Perec's book "La Disparation", translated to English as "A Void", which does not (in either language) contain any word with the letter "E" in either case in it (so those of us who know at least a little French realize that means no "le" or "les"... wow...). Anyway, this Mastodon was set up to implement the "no E" rule, and it was kind of a fun challenge to try to express yourself. My posts (and most folks') was pretty tortured text. The impressive bit was that there was a person there pursuing their Doctorate in Linguistics, and their posts... just read like ordinary English, with nothing tortured or strange about it. If you didn't know about the rule, you'd never guess it was in force. And they were fairly long, and covered a lot of ground... really amazing.
- baby 5y ago> One who thinks that the word ‘missiles’ is spelled “missles”, but a Mozart nonetheless. Gives me chills every time. I guess that's one of the trick to shorten a line of text.
- jollybean 5y agoNotice how clear the document is even with plain ascii formatting. This reminds me of old time military documents - they were peculiarly orthodox and notably very clear.
- dotancohen 5y agoCan someone please explain to me what is happening here. I'm an old fart. Is this a "blog" where every sentence is a twitter post? Is that to generate more views or something?
- 1123581321 5y agoYes, basically, it's written on Twitter because more people will see it there. On Twitter it needs to be broken into multiple posts anyway, but the post is broken into a few more than necessary so it breaks at more natural points and fits the common style on Twitter for post series like these. I don't care for it myself.
- dotancohen 5y agoI see, thank you.
- Vivtek 5y agoIt's pretty common on Twitter if you've got more to say than fits in a single tweet. There are even tools to let you manage it (i.e. write a thing and break it up and post individual tweets in order). Sometimes you'll see them numbered like /1, or if the author knows how many there will be in advance, 1/13, 2/13, etc. It's not uncommon to put a separate link in many of the individual tweets in the series.
- dotancohen 5y agoThanks.
- ErikCorry 5y agohttps://xkcd.com/276/ https://xkcd.com/276/
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Kaius 5y agoOk so I get that it could be quiet difficult to write sentences which must be of a fixed length. However hyperbolically calling it the most scarily/stunningly linguistic feat is ridiculous in the extreme. I am certain that a person sufficiently motivated, could produce a similar document. Comparing something like this to the work of Mozart is just nonsense. I mean, I couldn't write a piece of music like Mozart if my life depended on it.