Oulipo: Wordshift + 7
Oulipo: Wordshift + 7
The group of French writers, mathematicians, and artists called Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, roughly "Workshop of Potential Literature") explore many kinds of wordplay, puns, substitutions, and scrambled meanings, and their works can often be read in more than one way. Jean Lescure created S+7 (substantif+7, or noun+7), an algorithm for transforming text by replacing each noun in a specified text with the seventh noun that follows it in a given dictionary. The results are something like the popular Mad Libs books. In this version, you can control the source text (books from the curated Wolfram collection), the number of terms to offset (i.e., the number 7 in the original), and the parts of speech that are replaced (nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions).