From: norman@nose.cs.utoronto.ca (Norman Wilson)
Subject: [TUHS] Festoon
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 20:00:51 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <200302260101.h1Q11Qn84655@minnie.tuhs.org> (raw)
Ron Hardin, who worked at Western Electric in Columbus (I think)
at the time, confirms that he is the author:
Festoon was mine, chiefly written one Saturday with a tragically flawed
copy of Lester's _Introductory Transformational Grammar of English_
bought that morning on a $1 table at Woolworth on my knee.
The tragic flaw was that there are severe lexical constraints on language,
which is why there are so many made-up words in festoon, to avoid them.
The introduction of awful phrases came in reaction to writer's workbench
from Lorinda Cherry, which had a real mine of them; and phrases from my
boss, S D Hester, who was a wretched writer. People contributed on noticing
that.
It was greatly helped by troff (``The _pay_ people to write this crap?'' is
a typical reaction. Apparently it was not out of the question for Western
Electric.)
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
On the internet, nobody can tell you're whether you're on the internet.
next reply other threads:[~2003-02-26 1:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2003-02-26 1:00 Norman Wilson [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2003-02-26 5:46 Dennis Ritchie
2003-02-26 21:58 ` Warren Toomey
2003-02-25 16:13 Tim Bradshaw
2003-02-25 22:52 ` Tim Shoppa
2003-02-26 3:40 ` Warren Toomey
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