"'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the domus ..."
Yes, indeed! Take The Night Before Christmas (or any familiar piece) and replace 15% of the key words with Latin. It's surprisingly funny, and you don't need to know much Latin. In fact, I find it funnier with Dutch.
This is a great Python exercise, but it's not easy to specify what one means by "key word" as a regular expression. The zeroth order approximation is just to swap the last word in the sentence (first word before the period).
A similar (but easier) project is the translation loop game. Take a known piece of prose or poetry and pass it through automated translation into French, then French to German, and finally from German to English. This produces some real knee slappers.
"Eigenvalue is a strange hybrid, half-German, half-English. Liverwurst comes to mind!"--- J.R.Retherford (p.46)
Once the genie is out of the bottle, there is no reason to be shy, and I view "eignspace" and "eigenbasis" as irreplaceable.
Still, going back to games, there are lots of Python exercises here.
Here I mainly focus on economics, statistics, and more scientific topics, but there is one link that I am sure that you will so enjoy that I happily veer off topic. It's Instant Old English by Catherine Ball. Check it out, and I am sure that you will get back to me with a full throated: "Ic þe þancas do."
It's not entirely related, but you might enjoy reading the research observation:
"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae."
(Incidentally, I have not found the original source for this. It must appear in some publication. Let me know if you find it.)
"Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give-and-take of talk have worn away with use."
— Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness In the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). Incidentally, I found this at Word Spy, a site devoted to words, especially their first recorded uses.
Perhaps a a quick trip to a Japanese phrase book will serve us well: “itachi no saigo no shippe”
"I may sound strident on a lot of points, but this is one where I truly believe that the people who disagree with me are deranged. The answer is breathtakingly simple: It's our job to tell the truth." Journalist and editor Bill Walsh (Lapsing Into a Comma, p.63) commenting on the soft edges of reporting.
"If you, like I, are also a sucker for the Stalinist romance, try Tete-â-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre , compulsively readable and well above average for its genre." --- from the blog, Marginal Revolution
"Writing is like prostitution. First one writes for the love of doing it, then for a few friends, and, in the end, for the money." – Molière
J.-P. Sartre was sadly mistaken about a great many things, but no one can deny that he had a knack for crafting memorable phrases, such as the head spinning assertion: "Man is constrained to be free.
A modesty entertaining solitaire game is to think of a "funny" book title and then take it seriously.
One that I have been considering for a while is Dogs that Saved Lives. Although invented for fun, there really is material here. Who can say? A book contract might not be that far off.
Here is an idea for a book series that might not be too nutty for commercial success. The idea is to take a topic of natural interest to kids and uses that topic to teach foreign words and phrases. For example, there is the Hebrew-Baseball volume Shalosh Strikes and You are Out!
I am pretty sure that some books have come to life this way. How else could there be a whole book on the Petersen graph?
Not to mention the new book from the distinguished Palgrave press!
A rhyme demonstrates the similarity between the two:
"Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Fries."
"Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk."
The pronunciations --- if not identical --- are at least very close.
Headlines Here are a few of my own construction. Someday I may recycle them into a larger project.
Cant, a poem composed entirely of clichés.
Punctuation Jokes! Who says professors can't have fun?
Bad Analogies? They're like...
"Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep. The native language takes precedence over every other subject of study: nothing else can compare with it in usefulness." --- Northrop Frye in The Educated Imagination.
Further Items that are not funny.
