I find myself noticing scansion

[simont]

Somewhere in my head is a very specialised pattern-recognition neuron, which seems to fire whenever I encounter - or, even more so, inadvertently write - any phrase or sentence that would scan perfectly as the first line of a limerick.

It's a very persistent and attention-grabbing neuron, for some reason. Every time it fires, I have to spend the

Comments

[deborah_c]

Wouldn't it just be easier to write your commit comments in the form of limericks?

[simont]

I'm not sure easier is the word I'd choose :-) That could have the potential to be even more of a time-sink than the time I read Paradise Lost and a few days later found myself having to write a large collection of error messages at work, and my hindbrain insisted on trying to put them all in iambic pentameter.

[deborah_c]

... still not seeing the problem ;-)

[deliberateblank]

A cleanup I noticed in passing
to prevent the bugs from amassing
In a library of code
for a JavaScript Node
Merely led to some pointless subclassing.

[gjm11]

#define LAST_LINE() syllable LAST_LINE() LAST_LINE()

I find myself noticing scansion
While pondering macro-expansion.
Like the Bard of Japan
My macros don't scan
LAST_LINE()

(Note 1. The only other not-terribly-obscure -ansion word is "mansion". Note 2. No, macro-expansion doesn't actually work that way in the C preprocessor. Note 3. But if it did, I promise that any time the expansion terminates it does so with -ansion at the end. Note 4. I am aware of the grammatical infelicity in lines 3-4.)

[geekette8]

I've never noticed that (but now I will, gee thanks) but I do notice headlines that fit to Camptown Races ever since someone on Facebook pointed it out. From today's BBC News: "Livingstone stands by Savile jibe (doo dah, doo dah)"