| Friday, April 21, 2006 |
| Linguistini Quarterly |
To continue a theme present in your mind (if not in mine too), four letter words are in general very useful. As many office workers can attest, even the most dulled of brains can construct meaning from context, however obtuse the subject matter may be. To illustrate, please read the following article which has been reproduced accurately except with a maximum character-count of four per word. And yet, the content is largely understandable.
If you were an acto and were more-or-less avai (or even, as in my case, huge and unde in dema from all quar of the indu but still just abou avai) and your agen were to ring you with an offe to play (with reco to any Russ acce) the glor self-serv ponc, shys Chic at the hear of Gogo - unus for Russ lite (not that I've read it all) - humo, sati and, some woul say, alle mast Dead Soul; and if you felt espe qual to unde the part havi alre perf the kind role of Hles at the tend age of 14 in a (rath well-rece, if I reca) scho prod of Gogo othe grea work The Gove Insp and furt, if you were appr of the fact that the piec was adap with rigo, irre and unab sill by word Dan (what a grea surn) Rebe of rece criti accl thea piec Here What I Did with My Body One Day fame; and if you knew that you also had the envi oppo to play the merr fool (just an expr - not a char in Dead Souls) with (and I don't wish to come over too luvv but...) a supe cast of love folk head, in the role of narr, by none othe by than the admi unpr and pers, pere and Pyth-y Pali; and (here's a, if not, the rub), even if acce of said role enta trav to Manc with a rece hern disc (lett of symp and gifts of cond to my agen, plea) and reco the enti proc over the cour of four days whil knee on cush and squa in a seri of undi and only occa comf posi, and desp ever best effo and lots of coff and bisc and symp, you were still in cons pain, but that pain led you to some feel a stran empa with the spir and hist suff of the Russ peop as a whol and the pers torm of the auth hims who, in late year, havi fall unde the infl of a zeal prie, agon over the perc amor of his crea (Goog Gogo for more info); if, in conc, all the abov cond obta, woul you acce the job even at the risk of thus some offe the dead soul of Gogo hims? I did.
PS: I woul very much like to be cons for the role of "zeal prie" in any fort dram of Gogo life (I expe Pali will be offe the main part). Could you tell that the article was indeed by none other than Mark Heap, much vaunted theatri-comic actor, writing about a two-part production of Gogol's Dead Souls to feature on Radio 4 in which he will be playing the lead character of Chichikov starting this Sunday 23 April, from 3pm to 4pm, and again the following week (The full and unabbreviated text is available to read in this week's Radio Times, accompanied by a picture-portrait and an artistic representation of the play's production)?
Interestingly, not only does this show something of the innate ability of the human mind to seek meaning by connecting disparate sources, but word-shortening techniques can also be used as an aid when learning large amounts of written material: after a period of time, the learner restores the altered passage from memory. The extra work involved in reconstructing a text both meaningful and faithful text is most assistive in the creation and strengthening of neural networks. It should be noted that by constricting wordlength at four letters, the overall character count dropped by only 22.7%, emphasising the prolifigacy of our small friends. Further study could also draw attention to attention spans, breathing capacity, and the psychogrammatical feature written into the original text as it stands at a mere three sentences long (max length 394w, min 2w, median 124.3r). |
posted by pine-cones @ 13:00  |
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