29 February 2004. Today it's back to my work as a eulexicographer. A eulexicographer is one who makes dictionaries of the best words with their best meanings, not the most-used words, which are generally the worst words, with their worst meanings. And I think of George Bernard Shaw's campaign to rationalize spelling--which I completely oppose. Am I inconsistent? I don't think so. I believe words can never become so rigorously defined and systematically named for there to be any danger of excessive verbal predictibility. Spelling, however, could easily be made entirely rational--and boring. Infraverbal poetry would no longer be possible. I think words would become less engaging even for ordinary readers, too--albeit probably they wouldn't consciously be aware of it. I think a variety of spellings is mentally stimulating.

No matter how vigorously people like me try to make the language as rational as mathematics, though, we will fail. There are just too many words, and too many words impossible to define narrowly. Indeed, no word is withour borblurs, or margins they inseparably share with some other word or words, making no one words the "right" one to then use. I'm not really out to do that, anyway. I just want important words to be precisely defined, and systematically named. To put it another way, I want the principal concepts and tools of all fields of human endeavor to be treated the way scientists try to treat theirs. I would allow words to be used figuratively. So, for example, while I would want "poem" to have a precise, objective definition, I would certainly approve of people's calling a flower arrangement poetry if they felt like it--so long as they and their infocipients knew they were not using the term literally.

"Poetry," is probably the term I've worked the hardest to define with maximal objectivity. Don't worry, I'm not getting into that here. Anyone interested in my current, nearly-as- complete-as-I-can-get-it definition can read my essay on literary taxonomy at Comprepoetica, my poetcetera site, which is at http://www.geocities.com/Comprepoetica. Today I'm just going to berate a term of Alan Sondheim's. He's aware of my problem with it, but has not bothered to defend it. The term is "codework."

"Codework," as I understand it (without having super-carefully researched the matter) is the name Sondheim and others have given to art making a significant use of one or more computer languages. My immediate problem with it is that many poems use codes that do not use computer language. My own cryptographiku, for instance. A second problem with the term is that no adjectival form of it is readily available. Finally, it is not part of any taxonomic system, but pretty much ad hoc. It therefore suffers the defects most words in any language suffer--it significantly connects to a specific only, not to a family. One can't readily flow from it into some constellation of larger concepts, or narrow down from it into even smaller related forms.

What would I call such art? It's a dilemma. It's clearly a form of literature. I already term literature written in any kind of code, "cryptographic" literature, so it would have to be a subclass of that.. It seems to me it should have the word "compu-" as part of it, or "cyber." It needs more to distinguish it from "computer literature," or literature resulting from computer programs. Also from literature that makes important use of computers but isn't (on the surface) in computer language--hypertext, for instance. "Compulinguistic" would be accurate but is unwieldily long. "Compulexical" would be another possibility. "Compulingual?" "Computextual?"

Perhaps "compulexic" would be the best.

Yes, I'm aware that hardly anyone, anywhere, would be interested in these comments of mine, even if I were part of the Establishment. I know, too, that an even smaller percentage of poets and people interested in poetry would be interested in them. In fact, I know that nearly all poets and people interested in poetry hate the whole idea of "pigeon- holing"--at least when they're not giving their kind of poetry names. I realize, as well, the futility of trying to impose common sense on the choice of terminology, particularly in the arts. I'm driven, though. And perhaps there are one or two other people like me in the world who will feel less alone because of what I've written here.

Note: after posting the above entry, I was shocked to learn that lyx ish aka liz was had died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 48. A great loss to my field, and to me personally, however unfortunately brief and few our face-to-face encounters were. It will take me a long time to adjust to the jolt (to the degree it is possible to adjust to such things).