Do you ever read some fancy old writing and wish you could express yourself in more lofty ways?  This feeling could as easily apply to reading old polemics by political activists and philosophers as to the art, the overly complex asides, the amusing constructions of somebody like Edgar Allen Poe or Henry James or Lord Byron.  On the other hand, I do suspect I lose some readers to such indulgences – and I barely dip my toe into those deep waters.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I bore as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.  You, who know so well the depth of my character shall not suppose that I gave utterance to a threat, or …   … That’s all I have memorized.  I should really get the rest in my dome.  It’s such a fun piece of literary spite.  But also.  I’d like to talk like that.  Sometimes, a little bit, and sometimes.

This reminds me of a discussion I had with a chatbot.  Chatbots can “act,” can speak in whatever manner you suggest to them, but they tend to forget or lose their bead on the character.  Before deepseek became too overwhelmed to function most of the time, I managed to tease it into talking like an overly erudite cowboy – think Sam Elliott’s narrator character in Big Lebowski – for a good length of time.  But to keep it in character, I had to speak in the exact same way.  It was too challenging, but I might post it here sometime for amusement.

Every once in a while a post crosses my social media about lexical gaps.  Have you seen these?  There are word constructions in the English language, comprised of prefixes, suffixes, and altered vowels or consonants, that change the meaning of the root word in prescribed ways.  purchase, pre-purchase, purchaser, purchased, etc.  There are many words suggested by these constructions that are never actually used in English, and some may have legitimate use; these are the lexical gaps.  They can also sound very funny.  I have a half-baked ambition to produce ten-thousand of these in an excel spreadsheet (or more likely force my husband to), and pore over them for the kind of usefulness that could go viral.  Like, if I start using those oddball words consistently, I can get others to spread them for me – change language on purpose.

I’m not going anywhere in particular with this, just expressing some related ideas and feelings.  If any of you should take the fancy to parlay in the manner of an over-educated cowboy in the comments, sidle up to the post and suit thyself, pardners.

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