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Examples of Automotive Haiku from Car Talk:
flaming wrinkled death
flies down the road in first gear
with her blinker on
--Gregory Engel
Hilltop. Lake below.
My car sinks so slowly. Thank
god it's a rental.
--Carlisle Landel
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The strange language spoken by circus owner Papa Lazarou, from the British dark comedy series The League of Gentlemen, may technically be gibberish ("Autom, sprow. Cana, tik bana! Sandwol, but no sera smee?") But it was inspired by Parlari, the private language of traveling British circus folk.
Pioneering West African composer Julien Jacob sings in his own mysterious, imaginary language, allowing his listeners to interpret his songs in their own way.
More from AskMefi: I'm 6'8". People are always asking me how tall I am. Instead of telling the truth, what are some witty, non-confrontational responses I might use? "Depends on where you start measuring." Vesona
is a universal language proposed by Dr. Alesha Sivartha, in which the
first two or three letters of any word give the general meaning and the
added letters specialize these meanings. An elaborate circular diagram (copy and paste link in new window) shows how Vesona encapsulates all of human knowledge. Verdurian
is a language spoken by 55 million imaginary people. The fruitful
creativity of Mark Rosenfelder offers background on the history,
grammar, and literature of Verdurian, as well as a Language Kit for constructing your own artificial languages. How to say How many flowers are in Pia Zadora's vase? in Esperanto? From Prolific Lo-Fi recording artist Ken Clinger,
who records songs in both English & Esperanto. He juxtaposes
awkward practice sentences from foreign language tutorials, creating
absurd, surreal alternate realities.
Why English is a Silly Language.
"It's really a wonder that any one manages to successfully speak
English at all. That people learn it all over the world is just
incredible... I mean amazing."
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Jorge Luis Borges dreamed of a language called Ursprache
with absolutely no nouns. For example, there's no word for "moon," but
there's a verb meaning "to moon" or "to moonate." The sentence "The
moon rose above the water" in Ursprache would translate as "Upward
behind the onstreaming it mooned." The hypothetical lost continent of Mu (also known as Lemuria)
is said to have been destroyed in a global upheaval tens of thousands
of years ago. Unorthodox researcher Col. James Churchward believed he
rediscovered Mu's alphabet, comprised of beautiful and intricate glyphs. This is a post that I am “co-blogging” with Hanan Levin of Grow-a-Brain. Thank you, Hanan, for the links you suggested!
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Ben Macintyre of The Times
is against the bid to flush semicolons out of our prose — what he calls
"semi-colonic irrigation." He makes the following lovely point:
The beauty of the semi-colon lies in
its very vagueness. It indicates both connection and division. It is a
gentle way of connecting thoughts, without applying the abrupt brake of
a full stop or the breathiness of a comma. It implies a qualification
or refinement of the idea stated in the first part of the sentence.
Sometimes a string of semi-colons shows an evolving idea or
description, a string of interconnected ideas.
Virginia Woolf opens Mrs Dalloway with a lovely spray of semi-colons:
“How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the
early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and
sharp and yet (for a girl of 18 as she was then) solemn, feeling as she
did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about
to happen; looking at the tress with smoke winding off them and the
rooks rising, falling; standing and looking . . . ” |
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From The Which Punctuation Mark Are You Test:
"Congratulations! You are the semicolon! You are the highest expression
of punctuation; no one has more of a right to be proud. In the hands of
a master, you will purr, sneering at commas, dismissing periods as
beneath your contempt. You separate and connect at the same time, and
no one does it better. The novice will find you difficult to come to
terms with, but you need no one. You are secure in your elegance,
knowing that you, and only you, have the power to mark the skill or
incompetence of the craftsman. You have no natural enemies; all fear
you. And never, NEVER let anyone tell you that you cannot appear in
dialogue!" |
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Speaking of semicolons, I stumbled upon the most marvelous poem by Matt
"World's Best Writer Ever" Getty, entitled "Inside the Semicolon
(Draft)." Here's the first stanza:
The sinister semicolon lurks
on the inside. Always inviting,
he calls you to follow as he opens
doors that look like walls.
To read more (you'll be glad you did), see the poetry section of Matt's website. |
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After six years of determined searching, Lars Rasmussen, a purveyor of fine used books, collected a complete alphabet of books with one letter for titles (including Scandinavian letters). He was inspired by this quotation from James Joyce's Ulysses:
Have you read his F?
O yes, but I prefer Q.
Yes, but W is wonderful.
O yes, W. |
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What makes a great story? Marketing expert Seth Godin
suggests that "The best stories don't teach people anything new.
Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes
and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when
reminded how right they were in the first place." (Thanks, Gordon!) |
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In English:
Two people were sitting by a fence. The first says:
"Tell me, if I'm looking at you, and thinking of something, and you
know that I'm thinking of that thing, and you're thinking of the same
thing, isn't it just as if we had said it?"
"Well, yes..."
"Then, which of us is it like he had said it?"
Translated into Zoinx:
ona be brazer ves unta`i, dalto`i. sila ro'st i tan:
= silali ga fen go, en nebasi go he`i ga, san fermisi go man xiruli,
san esasi ga mse`i fermisi go man set, san fermisi ga man tira, i`aneka
set vor mse`i silata gi`o'st? =
= sen dot... =
= san, eni`oka set ane`i fen gi`o, mse`i i`a'st vor mse`i silata ge`i set? =
The Zoinx
language (invented in 1993), does not have a fictional population of
speakers or a corresponding history, yet "quite a bit of cultural
information can be gathered from the language itself."
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Humorist Jonathan Caws-Elwitt contributes witty definitions to the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form. For example, here's his definition of archly:
To know if it's archly she speaks,
Look straight at her brow (not her cheeks).
If an eyebrow is raised,
Then please don't be fazed —
She's been this ironic for weeks.
Jonathan's one-act play The Can of Yams is currently in publication through Baker's Plays. |
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Can you name the "hottest" letter of the alphabet? Or the most
"upscale" letter? It seems that car manufacturers have created a
shortage of "luxury letters." NBC4 explains:
Luxury cars used to be called El
Dorados or Town-and-Countrys. Now they're called "M-35" and Q-45
and MDXs. And the Wall Street Journal reports that's creating a
shortage of luxury letter and number combinations. As it stands,
22 of the alphabet's 26- letters have been taken.
Letters "S" and "Z" are in great demand. But neither comes close
to letter "X", which is the hottest letter. And nobody wants O,
P, U, or Y which are seen as too ordinary for upscale. By the
way, B, F, and N are lousy letters too. But the way I see it, the
letters L, I, and Z make a delightful car combination. |
Original Content Copyright © 2025 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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= Tiger Woods is awesome, and other helpful phrases from the 
