© Copyright 2001 Richard Brodie
| I found the following untitled sonnet, attributed to a Dr. J. Addison
Alexander, in a book entitled "Development of English Literature and Language",
by Alfred H. Welsh, published in 1888. It was in a section entitled "Superiority
of Saxon English".
In addition to containing exactly 140 one-syllable words, it has the unusual rhyme pattern: ababcbc, repeated twice. By contrast, my anagram seeks to employ as many "big, round words" and "sleek, fat phrases" as possible. My lines tend to contain fewer letters, since there are naturally more open syllables in polysyllabic words than there are in a collection of monosyllabic ones. The result is that the anagram consists of two additional lines, with the pattern augmented to: ababcbcb. In form, this is an anti-gram. But in substance it is what I call a contragram, i.e. one which turns an original's "A is good" into "Non-A is bad". In this case, the titles are anagrammed separately |
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Superiority of Saxon English Think not that strength lies in the big, round
word,
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Oh! Singularity of Expression With elocution snobbish, puissance
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