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A Facebook Meme That’s Harder Than It Looks
Completely Incoherent
My comments look like activators for a sleeper cell
There’s a meme going around on Facebook that mocks the usual “leave one word that describes how we met” glurge, and asks respondents to comment, instead, with incoherent nonsense.
This might work better if I drank. In fact, if I drank like Hemingway, I would not write like Hemingway. I might manage something dark and depressing, like Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” If I took opiates, I would not write like Edgar Allan Poe; I’d be lucky to stay awake.
Coffee might work.
But the funny thing is, as my friends and I attempt this, our “completely incoherent ramblings” sound like something out of an old, very bad, spy movie. Or an amateur rip-off of “Jabberwocky.” I think we’ve proved it’s harder to write utter crap than you might think.
We know the sounds and rhythms of language, and it’s really hard to break those patterns. Even stringing together words like plastic pop-beads — words that aren’t really meant to go together, but can be connected through conjuction junctions and punctuation functions — we gravitate towards something that conveys meaning.
