This morning, I wanted to make a pun on the idea of a poet as a “maker” and a poem as “a made thing”; before I did so, though, I went to Google to check that I had the etymology right. What I found reminded me of those IQ test questions where you fill in the next word in a set or in a sequence.
Here the sequence starts “poet, poem, poetry,” but the final word is not the one I would have expected:
The time before last when I upgraded to a new laptop, I was very careful to keep copies of all my old writing; so the other day when I went looking for an article written in 1999, I found several versions of it on my current computer.
Sadly, none of them were compatible with the programs I have available, and when I opened one of the documents, it began like this:
##MMXPR3#C#CXP#########################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################.### ###.#######�### ###�###�###�############################### ###
#######
There are 115 pages, with huge blank expanses and intermittent passages like the above. The three-page article is also in there, but it would require more patience than I have to hand in order to extract it.
Continue reading “no going back”
…which seems to be a little confused:
(The fact that the “match case” box is ticked is a red herring. That was for an earlier “search and replace” operation.)
Maybe I should point out that although I complain about the results of automatic translation and correction programs, I still find them relatively useful. And amusing, of course.
don't confuse the narrator 