Friday, September 16, 2011

Behold Awesome!

The news feed from NPR can, more often than not, be a bit obtuse in what is being covered. Yes, important things such as the deficit, the war, the state of the planet and not the comings and goings of celebrities are covered. But I can often feel as if there is nothing happening to give me "warm fuzzies". And then Friday comes.

Friday seems to be the day when music, art, literature, culture and humor are released from their cages where they are kept all week. The things they find to talk about on Friday are brilliant. I think today, I have found the best item, which may or may not be replaced by something more exciting next Friday.

From the Oxford Dictionaries "OxfordWords" blog (How did I not know about this blog before now?) comes the "How Shakespearean are you?" word analyzer. I'm giddy! Of course, I simply MUST try this out. I have just finished retyping Chapter 10 of a guild story I started writing over a year ago. Let's grab a paragraph from that and see what the analyzer says.

This is the paragraph. It's a paragraph about a battle.
The ooze moved toward Rineva. She called down another barrage of fire. Suddenly, the campfire roared up to almost eye level. Rineva looked down and the flames were being fed by any wood Amaera could find. If the ooze felt or sensed the flames, it did not waiver as it bore down on Rineva. She could feel her life slowly ebbing away from the contact with the ooze as she had shoved her way through it. There was another wave of warm healing but it was quickly replaced by the uncomfortable feeling of life ebbing. She raised her arms and cast a Life Tap. Health flooded into her, but, again, she knew it was only prolonging the inevitable. 
Shakespeare would not relate to self-propelled oozes. He might relate to the use of magic to heal and harm, as this kind of thing was more real to those in the 16th and 17th Centuries than it is to us today. I pasted the above paragraph into the analyzer and I got...

89% Shakespearean.

I'm doing the bard proud. 

Beverage:  Mountain Dew

Deb

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