Typo 3 is now available! For the third issue of this inimitable publication, I contributed a parody of Oscar Wilde (“Bosie’s Translation”), an article on the design of single-serve salt packets, a design for a Hawaiian Ouija board, and a translation of a letter by Aloysius Bertrand, as well as examples from my collection of […]

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Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817) was an ardent naturalist, and earned a bit of notoriety in his time for his research into the language of birds.  In his 1807 work, Quelques mémoires sur différens sujets, la plupart d’histoire naturelle, ou de physique générale et particulière (Some notes on different subjects, mostly on natural […]

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Solrésol has had somewhat of a revival in recent years, due at least partially to a popular article by Paul Collins. The system is an early attempt at an auxiliary artificial language, developed by François Sudre in the 19th century, and based on the seven notes of the diatonic scale.  He spoke it with solfeggio […]

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Raymond Roussel does seem like the kind of writer who would write acrostics.  His works are steeped in wordplay.  The procédé is based on homonyms; “Parmi les noirs” throws in a rebus and a cryptogram; there’s a sonnet with a hidden message in La Poussière de Soleils; and so on.  Acrostics seem inevitable.

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The “King James Version” of the Bible gives every indication of a garbled text.  Some words are omitted (for example, that curious hapax legomenon, επιουσιος, in the Pater Noster); some words seem to be approximations or guesswork (particularly the names of animals and musical instruments).  Much of it simply makes little sense. We encounter similar […]

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I’m happy to inform you that you can now savor that notorious lipogrammatical curiosity, Gadsby, simply by following this link.  Gadsby has long had an almost mythological status among linguistic buffs (and Oulipo fans); most of its original printing was lost long ago, but luckily a microfilm proof copy still sits in a public library (in California, I […]

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On Sunday, May 16th, hardcore fans of the suggestive braved suspended subway service and a glorious sunny afternoon to take in some harmless smut at the Ullage Group’s “Not Dirty, Just Spicy” event at Jalopy. Doug Skinner started things off by reviewing the rhetoric of extended double-entendre. To drive the point home, he performed the […]

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I’m puzzled by the word “spiritual.”  I understand it as a noun, meaning a genre of vocal music.  But as an adjective, it has me stumped. When I meet someone who spatters his or her sentences with it, I sometimes ask what it means.  She or he usually refuses, often with projectile hostility.  One woman […]

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There are plenty of ways to make a point quickly and emphatically, but few are as economical as a good interjection. Compared to the expressions one never runs across anymore except in Shakespeare, eighteenth century novels, and Mad Libs, most recent examples are pretty unmusical, uninspired, and linguistically dull: “wow,” “cool,” “awesome,” “Jesus.” This extends […]

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