xkcd and ten hundred words

[gloriana]

Today the man I love and live with and share two cats and one house with - and who I am the wife of1 - wrote a very long story. It took a lot of words to tell his story, because he could only use the ten hundred words that everyone uses, and he could not use all the other tens of hundreds more words he knows because he reads a lot. He got the idea

Comments

[karitawyr]

I did enjoy the story, especially "a piece of a thing that goes in the water for the cat to eat."

I tried the ten hundred words thing and the first I used was not one of the words. Yesterday had to be changed to the day before today.

[gloriana]

Heh, I didn't even notice that yesterday wasn't there :) Odd that 'cat' is so common and the thing that goes in the water isn't.

[the_emu]

Oh, that came out great. I loved that xkcd.

Makes you all the more impressed by Dr Seuss and his 225 word vocab books, doesn't it?

8^-

[gloriana]

Absolutely. Hubby found a version of Kipling's poem "If" that someone had modified writing it in there; and a surprising amount of it didn't have to be changed at all.

[batagur]

That's actually pretty nifty. I'll have to show that ten hundred words site to my husband. (He's a poet and flash fiction writer.)

[gloriana]

It's a great writing exercise :) But oddly, at the other end of the scale from flash fiction and poetry in some ways, since those are often about finding the exact, perfect word which will replace a dozen others, and this .... goes the other way round :)

[darththalia]

I just read this to Matt, and we laughed through the whole thing, especially when poor Mr. G. "did not like his cat." You both have a lot more patience than I would.

[gloriana]

I cannot tell you.

The poor couple whose house we invaded had only moved to the US two months before from central Europe; and were completely taken aback by two eccentric English people turning up on their doorstep with this strange cat device that looks like it came from an amateur sci-fi stage production. Gods knows what they thought we were planning to do. But they were very very sweet in the end, and the husband of the pair was crawling around in the dirt of their basement along with my husband, getting absolutely filthy. I cannot tell you how embarrassed and guilty we felt.

Cat, at least, managed to scare himself almost as much as he scared us; and was jumpy and nervy for a full week after (half of which he spent locked in our house). Hopefully he will not roam again for quite some time.

[archaeologist_d]

I liked how he had to describe things that weren't on the list. I'd be pretty upset with the cat!

[gloriana]

We do not love our cat.

We do not let him snuggle in the bed, eat cheese at table, or do anything he wants, ever.

Of course we don't.