A pwoermd a day

                                                             dimentional (posted Thursday, July 01,2010)

First transposition (as in the case of 'caugth') and now a simple substitution, a 't' for the normal 's', to the degree that any word-formation modelled on patterns of resemblance and relationship seems simple. But Huth's letter-substitution is far from simple. Being both necessary (vital harbingers for any future semantical development) but also playfully loose and gratuitous, as if thought of at will. Perhaps the pwoermd is a way to ground the possibility of semantic newness in language's very renewable course: or perhaps even to show that meaning and the evolution of language can oftentimes take parallel courses, weaving close to but never touching each other (asymptotically). So that intersections have to be wilfully inserted.The problem of slotting linguistic surprises into normal readerly expectations like 'dimentional' is worth taking a critical look at for otherwise the language-reality paradigm to which we're still committed (surprisingly still Carnapian and analytical) might not appear wooden, stodgy enough to get anyone's attention. So much for origins. What about the pwoermd itself?

Where did 'dimentional' come from then? And how was it formed?  Well, it seems to have been: self-sprung. Sui generis but in a more whimsical sense (like the poet writing in his bathing suit).We perhaps seem to need the same space, speed and technical styles of digitized modes to arrive at anything like the transpositions & substitutions (among others) in pwoermd-formation: all necessary but in the end radically gratuitous conditions. Perhaps it's the 'dimensional' subtext of Huth's pwoermd. The kind of send-up of depth in poetry that underlies most of new media poetries. And Huth is also a media poet. Making poets as much "digerati" as literati. How did the 't' for 's' substitution suggest itself really perhaps if not as freely as the decision to write a HTML-based poetry in the first place?We can do without Internet literacy as long as books & handouts are still considered okay alternatives: living forms (as Gould has taught) that can turn back without actually being regressive. The asynchronous, nonlinear, and everything radically virtual—what are these but (in Lockean parlance) just secondary qualities, more imagined & disposable than real: gifts of the imaginative head only.

But 'dimentional' itself? The thing itself? Perhaps in the pwoermd itself is just a taste of the 'space' and 'speed' and 'digitzed' feel of hypertext works: the semblance of the reality that the play of letter substitutions feels like it's imitating and never really is. A taste of verbal madness: after all, if 'e' subs for 'i' we've also got a case of 'dementia', don't we? Or just jouissance without senses jostling into position. Perhaps poet, cyborg-like, has morphed into a poetry-writing machine. As if the pwoermd is saying, 'Look at what the poet, in his wetsuit, who transposes, substitutes freely is doing rather than the pwoermd itself.' The wetware between the ears rather than the hardware in the sand.

Used in a sentence: Einstein discovered the dimentional properties of space-time in his sleep.