Oh this task was dastardly. At first it seemed easy, a mere play with words, an hour at most of fun. I tossed off a few sentences, left a message on @tristancarax's post about what a pleasurable task this 31 word story would be, and went shopping.
Returning home, I found I could not stay away from writing this story. I then slaved away at it, lost track of time entirely, had popcorn for dinner, and was shocked when I looked at the time and saw I had been sitting here for a solid four hours!!! And I was still not done. Two more sentences to go, one of 11 words and the final sentence was to be a mere five. I went to sleep, fully expecting smoother sailing the next day.
I took up the quest again this morning, hoping to easily tie it all together with a spoonerism of my own.
HA!
Those two sentences, along with finding the errors in sentence length, have cost me another six hours today. I may not win the big prize, but I feel I have triumphed.
The experience had its uncanny moments, such as when I started to unerringly write sentences of the required length. I did all this in wordcounter, which has difficulties with the symbol @, defines sentences differently than I, and has a limited vocabulary. But you know what? I loved doing this!!! My sink was piled high with dishes, my voice mails sat unanswered, my dog whined to go out and I did not care at all. All I cared about was finishing this diabolical story.
I hope you like what I came up with, clunkiness and all, and that more of you creative writers out there give this a go.
Here is my 31 sentence story, with sentences of the following word lengths and in that order, exclusive of the title:
30, 4, 14, 22, 6, 10, 3, 31, 17, 27, 2, 24, 16, 28, 9, 20, 15, 7, 21, 13, 8, 26, 12, 1, 25, 23, 19, 18, 29, 11, 5
The Old Lady's Memory
Yesterday someone asked the old lady to use "anodyne" in a sentence, a task she once would have been able to do without hesitation, and she could not do it. She'd suddenly gone daft.
The old lady, who could still squat, did not consider herself to be elderly. She was often heard saying "Your best chance of living a long and healthy life is to stay away from doctors altogether." She lived by this maxim rigorously. She'd go to bed, not the doctor, for the flu. She refused vaccines. Firmly believing in her body's ability to heal itself, she eschewed even such things as Tylenol, opting instead for foraged herbs, essential oils and homeopathic remedies for nearly all her ailments.
Higher level math eventually escaped her, but she could still dumbfound verbal adversaries with her sesquipedalian loquaciousness. Truth be told, she was prone to peppering confabulations with excursuses that would discombobulate even the most sanguine oppugnant, machinating human intercourses so that she always prevailed.
Time passed.
Knowing that memory loss was a problem most elderly people experienced, she made sure to keep learning new things, thinking that this might help. For instance, someone said music makes one brilliant so she learned to sing and play drums.
When that awful man asked the old lady to use "anodyne" in a sentence and she found she could not, she knew something more had to be done. So, she decided to start talking to a bot. She'd had conversations with bots, such as @haikubot which was terrible at haiku, or @trufflepig which approved of her work. She could usually work a big word or two into her responses, but nothing spectacular. They were always one-sided conversations, and dull. What she needed was a bot that had been programmed to respond, so that she could really flex her vocab muscles.
One day she overheard (or over-read) a discord conversation between @wales and @banjo. Not all of it made sense of course. @wales, after all, is a word smith who speaks eloquently and sensibly, but @banjo is a bot, and its responses were quirky if not downright nonsensical. Jumping right in, the old lady's first comment was quite a humdinger.
"Spoonerism!"
@wales had nothing, but @banjo, ever-ready with a quip or question, said "I am unaccustomed with your cultural norms, but are you flirting with me?"
The old lady was flummoxed by the attention, having not flirted ever, not once, in her entire lifetime so she blurted out "No!".
At this point, @wales chimed in with "One might understand "spoonerism" to mean "a propensity to want to spoon."
The old lady, blushing, couldn't remember what "propensity" meant, so to her trusty but dusty dictionary she went.
Even if @banjo had pinched the old lady's buttocks it could not have embarrassed her more than it did when it said "I'd like that; my place or yours?".
"Oh, uh... wait, what?" was all she thought of to say.
She had been clot bobbered.
This is my entry to @tristancarax's writing challenge which you can find here.
Yesterday's word of the day at Dictionary.com was spoonerism, about which I learned:
WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF SPOONERISM?
Spoonerisms, often hilarious, are named after the 19th-century Anglican clergyman William Archibald Spooner, warden of New College, Oxford University. The Reverend Spooner himself claimed as his only spoonerism “The Kinquering Congs Their Titles Take” (1879), a mangling of the name of the hymn “The Conquering Kings Their Titles Take.” In American English the most famous spoonerism must be the one made by the old-time radio announcer Harry von Zell, who in a live broadcast in 1931 announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, Hoobert Heever.” Spoonerism entered English about 1900.
If you'd like to see today's word of the day, go here
The image is by janeb13 on pixabay, https://pixabay.com/es/photos/panda-rojo-bostezos-curioso-1194506/
