08.13.03

Vex swim

Posted in Flotsam at 11:51 am by

Say what you like about texting from mobile phones (please, be my guest), but I think there’s the faint image in it of a new form of rhyme.

When texting, the ‘autocomplete’ feature on my phone (or whatever they call it in the manual) takes a guess as to what word I’m typing. This could lead us down the path of information theory, but let’s not, eh? Instead, let’s consider typing a normal, everyday word.

To type ‘enough’ I hit the keys 3, 6, 6, 8, 4, 4. All the way through, the phone tries to guess the word I’m typing. Of course, it doesn’t know if I’ve finished or not. The best guess is usually a word with the number of characters I’ve typed so far (hm, we are doing information theory, like it or not). So, by the time I’ve typed 3, 6, 6, 8, 4 the phone is merrily guessing ‘ennui’.

‘Ennui’ - ‘enough’. It’s a form of rhyme, albeit a grudgingly semantic one. I know it’s not an aural rhyme at all, but if there’s another term that happily covers this kind of correspondence between words, it temporarily escapes me. Blame the heat.

The other one I noticed this morning, soppy old fool I am, is ‘lips’ - ‘kisses’. I’m sure there are many more.

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