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Thursday, January 31, 2013

Interesting ways of making word salad (Post 1)

No, I'm actually not going to tell you what they are.  I'm going to see if I can get you to give me the input necessary to try some of them out.  A little at a time.

We'll start with some simple things.

This is the first line of Left Behind:
RAYFORD Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched.

Put it into a part of speech parser and you get:
NNP NNP POS NN VBD IN DT NN PRP VBD RB VBN.

Now we can do traditional mad libs style things with this, but at a greater level:

[proper noun] [proper noun2]'s [noun] was on a [noun2] he had [adverb] [verb].

And have the first commenter give something for the first word in brackets, the second give one for the second, and so on, but for the those to create a nice word salad you're not supposed to know the sentence and I've given it to you, though I would like to see what happens if six people each chose their own thing so we made a complete sentence with a different person filling in the blank for each one.  So please, do that.

Start from the start and give a word.  If no one has given anything yet give a proper noun.  If one person has given a proper noun give a second proper noun.  If there are two proper nouns give a noun, if there's one noun give a different noun, if the nouns are done give an adverb, and if the adverb is done give a verb.  In six comments we can have our sentence.

But, like I said, this is just a first step.

So rewrite the sentence as you see fit in a way that makes sense.

For example, "Ford Prefect's satchel was on a boulder he had often seen."  As we move into the future, things will get more interesting.

Or, rewrite it changing more of the words, but keeping the parts of speech intact: "Mila Anderson's sword was in the overlord she had always hated."

So, commenters, I call on you, do these things.

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You can do them all in one post.  Which would look like this:

[single word]

[sentence one]

[sentence two]

And if the single word thing gets done and you wanted to do it but didn't get the chance, start over from the beginning.  In twelve posts* we could have two versions where each person contributed one word.

Go now, do this.

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* What are the odds of getting twelve comments on a post around here?

12 comments:

  1. For the record, dave mabus, unless you're suggesting, "Dave Mabus' Armageddon was on a forum-topic he had loosely survived," which I don't think you are, you've kind of missed the point. Which is why I'm spamtrapping your posts.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Replies
    1. You got spamtrapped, sorry about that.

      Looks like we have an extra noun as a result, or we could make it into a verb, of which we do not yet have one, and put it in for the last word as "obstruct" or something similar. (Obstacled just doesn't really work. Obsticated maybe, but I'm pretty sure that's not a word either.)

      Delete
    2. And I forgot to mention, if anyone has their post mysteriously disappear: contact me. Sometimes it's because it really is gone, but other times it's in the spam trap and I can rescue it.

      Delete
  3. grapevine

    [Adverb noun(possessive) verb is adverb, but the noun is adjective the adjective].

    If you know me, you can probably derive backward to that one, but I'm interested to see what anyone makes of it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. methodically

    (hope I'm doing it right, my brain refuses to work right now)

    ---Redcrow

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. (hope I'm doing it right, my brain refuses to work right now)

      I wasn't going to say anything until we got a full sentence, which we're still a verb away from, but yes, you're doing it right.

      Delete
  5. So we've got:
    Angie Perez's bicycle was on a grapevine he had methodically stolen. That works.

    Also, because blogger spamtrapped something that wasn't spam, we have a noun all on it's own giving us:

    [proper noun] [proper noun2]'s [noun] was on a obstacle he had [adverb] [verb].

    Anyone care to make a sentence of that in one go?

    ReplyDelete