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Dictionary Lesson (Free verse) by Dovina

When I said, “I love you,” and soon realized its reciprocal, “You love me,” and its result, “We are in love,” and much later, with its contrary, “I don’t love you,” and finally its opposite, “I hate you,” and when, after a long hiatus, its many reverses blured into, “I have no feeling for you,” I realized my dictionary is a history, written ahead of fact, a compendium of devolution.

zodiac 16-Nov-04/11:41 PM
Of course your dictionary is a history written after the fact, since nothing that hasn't been done or at least imagined (in a few cases, like "teleport" or "anti-gravity machine") is going to make it into the dictionary (ie, "gloobzify", whatever the fuck that is.) It's just that all this relationship stuff has happened SO MANY TIMES that it's everybody on the fucking planet's history since the invention of language at least. That's why it's in the language. Anyway, you can fix it by just saying, "I saw my dictionary as a history written ahead of fact," or something such.

In fact, that will probably help with your last utterly ballsed line, too. A compendium of devolution???! For one thing, all the words you've picked out of the dictionary (reciprocal, result, contrary, opposite, reverses) don't of themselves make a devolution (cf, my example above, which only devolves into goopy smarm). They don't make a good poem about dictionaries, either, but that's not the point.

Secondly, if those words do make your life seem like a devolution, it might be because you've missed all these really ace words that are also in the dictionary (like "teleport" and "anti-gravity machine") and have nothing to do with devolution.

Thirdly, compendium and devolution are balls words to use in a poem. And this whole poem is based on your half-formed notion that anything transformed or described with big words is necessarily worse for it. Which is balls.

You're going to say I've proved that with my overanalysis here.

Balls. Your poem was bad before.




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