Overheard between language classes

Mis-pro-nounce-ment

“a word riot at the corner of i & j ”
when the grammar cops arrived
all they found was a math convention
a unit vector n pointing up from the corner of i & j
like an upward screwed right hand thumb
the grammar cops were not amused
they suspected a misspelling or worse, an acronym
wry, rye, maybe why not, or could it be knot
had they been sucked into a quantitative plot
a wry knot depiction engineered to make them look foolish
they vowed not to let the meaning escape them

no English major would italicize without reason
or could it be simply a poor choice of font
were the I, J and K just to delineate points
connecting the dots was essential
when they triangulated the evidence
they made an obtuse interpretation
that missed the direction and magnitude
of the symbolic language they were investigating
the logic of poetry proved an allegorical riot
when the vector was algebraic —
they had been victims of math psychology


If you really want to observe someone that takes the objective to the point of being subjective, get a load of this Good Math, Bad Math. I will guarantee you this guy would never turn the poetic direction on himself. (^_^)


Something to think about from S-Poetry

Essentials

Five great strengths of S are its variety of objects, its vector orientation, the power of subscripting, object-oriented programming and graphics. Each of these is explored before turning to other matters. A powerful and fairly unique part of S that will be addressed in later chapters is the possibility of computing on the language. Essentially everything in S for instance, a call to a function|is an S object. One viewpoint is that S has self-knowledge. This self-awareness makes a lot of things possible in S that are not in other languages.

Of fundamental importance is that S is a language.[my emphasis] This makes S much more useful than if it were merely a \package" for statistics or graphics or mathematics. Imagine if English were not a language, but merely a collection of words that could only be used individually|a package. Then what is expressed in this sentence is far more complex than any meaning that could be expressed with the English package.