Monday, May 26, 2008

" Thou art translated!"

" Indeed, put the terrestrial sphere on a clothsline," flung off the fiddle-faced Farrier, suffering his duke to take a header situatied upon the tea-wagon within the bounderies of a laid-off despondency.



Don't worry! It's not as bad as you think. When some friends were over a couple days ago we translated a paragraph form Manalive using a Thesaurus. It's a game I may have invented!



Here is the origional:

"`Oh, hang the common world!' said the sullen Smith, letting his fist fall on the table in an idle despair.

6 comments:

Lucia said...

Simply splendid! Bravo! One of the best word games I've played in quite a while! Here's the result of one of my experiments:

"Daddy Beige recoiled, and nictitated as if he were a human being roused from the arms of Morpheus."

The original, from "The Vanishing of Vaudrey" a Father Brown tale:

"Father Brown started, and blinked like a man awakened from sleep."

Algernon said...

Fun! Daddy Beige took me a second.;-)

Algernon said...

Heh...

I just noticed common; it's a typo.

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

teawagon, however, is not any table - it is as the name implies, a wagon to serve tea on

it is to brittle for the exercise here described

Algernon said...

Oh come, my boy! If it were a matter of life and death we could pick a quarrel with the thesaurus, but on this occasion does it matter especially?

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

It is only that I actually had a teawagon in the home when I was small - as for the Thesaurus it is not necessarily wrong, it is just that it sometimes gives "synonyms" that are really either "hyponyms" (teawagon is a special kind of table) or "hypernyms" (table would be the general category of teawagon, if you had looked the other way).