CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
"Every sentence includes an infinity of words; one perceives only a few of them, the others being in the infinite or being imaginary." —Raymond Queneau, qtd. in OULIPO: A Primer of Potential Literature
"Is all the mythology in the world here?" "No . . . Only words are here. They try to make me yield the rest but my words come from the North Country. They can't be pinned down between book covers. Our words like to play on the breeze. They congregate in the hollows of streams and fill the ravines." —Robin Llywelyn, From Empty Harbour to White Ocean
"That is the secret of small pieces of paper covered with words: they can prove we were here and give people some sense of us even after we are dead." —Geof Huth
"Language is civilization itself. The Word, even the most contradictory word, binds us together. Wordlessness isolates." —Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods.