From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: norman@nose.cs.utoronto.ca (Norman Wilson)
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 20:00:51 -0500
Subject: [TUHS] Festoon
Message-ID: <200302260101.h1Q11Qn84655@minnie.tuhs.org>

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.