Chryselephantine
July 2011
8 posts
“But on this we will write another time: the elephants of St. Petersburg have their own secret history.”
—Poemas del río Wang: The Nazi elephant
“Most of the various kinds of fireworks we use in our celebrations today were invented by the Chinese as weapons. Chinese wars were just as destructive as European wars, but much prettier.”
—Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.
“Obviously, loitering must be a threat to the very foundations of the capitalist system: by way of contrast, we never see “No Murdering” signs on street corners.”
—Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.
Play
“As for whether to put the nut facing upward or down — I consulted an aircraft enthusiast friend of mine, he said the rule of thumb is to always put the nuts on the bottom, so that if they fall off, you still hopefully have the bolt in the hole, holding stuff together.”
—Harbor Freight Trailers
“The form is quite simple. Take a familiar phrase—for preference a metaphor whose metaphorical qualities have dropped below long term viability, or a catchphrase whose time has been and gone—and substitute one or more parameterised parts. The canonical example (‘canonical’, by the way, having changed its meaning in 3.31 to ‘the one used in Wikipedia’) is x is the new black which can be easily varied as required: ‘pink is the new black’, ‘iPhone is the new black’ &c.&c. But note this is in fact an example of a curried parameterised cliché: the base phrase x is the new y can be parameterised with y set to a different value: ‘sex is the new golf’. The maximum arity currently supported by the 3.31 implementation of parameterised clichés is four (trivial pronoun and article variations don’t count), for example Peter Greenaway’s The w, the x, his y & her z 3 which can be instantiated to make headlines such as ‘The Footballer, the Housemate, The Sun & his Super Injunction’. Attempts to construct a 5-arity example based Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich or a 6-arity from Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb have so far not proven stable, generally falling foul of the ‘who that, Grandma?’ problem.”
—
SpecGram—Verity Stob and the Super Subjunction—Verity Stob
This could be a good way to explain currying and arity.
