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Comment by lmilcin

5 years ago 

  Do you take a possibility
  you can be both right and
  wrong? The feat might not
  be as difficult as author
  seems it is. I personally
  can think of many ways to
  achieve it. Come to think
  of it, it may actually be
  even easier because lines
  in that guide afford more
  ways to be broken because
  they are longer. And I am
  not even native speaker.

  To match lengths you only
  need to make one or maybe
  two choices per line only
  to adjust a word by maybe
  one or two chars. This is
  nothing very difficult as
  any crossword solver will
  attest.

12 comments

lmilcin

Reply
Gigablah  5 years ago

"take a possibility", "as author seems it is", "not even native speaker".

It's simple to fulfil the requirements, making it flow naturally is not. Also, any mistake early on in any paragraph will have cascading effects.

  • batch12  5 years ago

    The parent makes a good point. Maybe I am jaded, but this isn't a scarily impressive feat of linguistics. It is mildly interesting that someone put the time into this. I would be impressed if it were done on a typewriter. Maybe this rewrite helps clarify the point.

      Do you think its possible
  you can be both right and
  wrong? The feat might not
  be as crazy as the author
  claims to think. I myself
  can think of many ways to
  achieve it. Come to think
  of it, it may actually be
  even easier because lines
  in that guide afford more
  ways to be broken because
  they are longer. I am not
  even a native speaker.

    • randomswede  5 years ago

      Brick-texting isn't actually that hard, in short isolated bursts. Other geometric texts are not necessarily much harder, But, keeping it up over any length is somewhat impressive.

      I think the most "simultaneously observed forms" were brick-text with an acrosticon down the left-most column, or brick-text in iambic pentameter. I have attempted observing all tree, if ended badly.

  • lmilcin  5 years ago 

      As somebody said, I am just a
  random guy on the Internet. I
  learned this language already
  as an adult never attending a
  single lesson. There is a lot
  of other people that know the
  language way better than me.

  Thinking that it must be hard
  just because it is for you is
  a well known bias.

    (EDIT:)

    Gigablah, I can't reply to your comment because apparently I am rate limited.

    I am not saying it is easy. I am just saying it is not "most scarily/stunningly impressive linguistic feat".

    I hope you can appreciate there is a lot of space between "easy" and "stunningly impressive".

    • camjohnson26  5 years ago 

        It is easy to do this. All you
  do is write some text upfront,
  and go line by line and swap a
  few words to make the line fit
  in the margin. Use small words
  to make it easier.

    • Gigablah  5 years ago

      Conversely, thinking that it must be easy just because it is for you is an even more well-known bias.

      I can even think of an entire industry dedicated to countering this bias.

HPsquared  5 years ago

I suppose one only has to adjust the line length by at most half a word per line. It's impressive, but it's not exactly iambic pentameter.

dzdt  5 years ago

Also the author gives himself the liberty to use one or two spaces following a period, and on occasion even following a comma.

  • db48x  5 years ago

    I disagree that this is important. Search for a double space, and you will see only four that are inside a paragraph, and only one of those is after a comma. There are more stray spaces after the end of a line than there are double spaces inside of a paragraph.