like a bird on the wire @tentaclesandtypography - Tumblr Blog

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Vicky Butterfly by Maria S Vavela

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1977 NASA logo

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Natalie Dormer, photographed by Tony Duran for Michigan Avenue, fall 2015.

jezburrows

I’ve been experimenting with writing very, very short stories made up entirely of the example sentences given for words in the dictionary, with nothing added except a little punctuation to piece them together.

The idea came about when I noticed that the sentences used in Dictionary.app (which uses the New Oxford American Dictionary) were either weirdly specific or unexpectedly poignant. Talking to a lexicographer friend, I found out that these sentences are referred to as ‘in-line example sentences’ and are editorially researched and written by lexicographers in order to demonstrate the most probable construction of a sentence including that word.

I’m writing a handful of these and illustrating them for a little zine for next month’s Zinefest, but I’ll share more here when it’s wrapped up.