Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Found poetry

Well, not quite poetry, but there's something fortuitously allusive about the random use of English in T-shirt slogans these days.

I've just seen:

GREAT
MUST
DESIRE
HUGE

And I can see what the writer meant, I think.

Actually, I must confess, this was being worn by a rather generously-curved young woman, and some strange cognitive glitch in my brain read it first as:

GREAT
BUST
DESIRE
HUGE

The random text generators that many spam e-mails seem to be using these days occasionally throw up a particularly resonant - if not conventionally meaningful - combination of words too. I was especially drawn to this one recently: antagonistic mural, catatonia polymorphic silhouette.

And while on this theme, sort of, I recall my favourite creation from the days when I had a 'Magnetic Poetry' set on my fridge door (it was several years ago, while I was living in Toronto):

language like iron will beat your butt blue

You'd better believe it.

1 comment:

Livia said...

My favourite fridge creation was (with the Shakespeare edition) "Out loathsome wench and make trifle to poison his lordship"

Livia