mutilation odes, 5
there is no reason
there is reason to think
what is the reason
ex Mutilation Odes (2001)
note —
Most of the language in these essays is taken from Henry J Rogers The Telegraph Dictionary and Seamen’s Signal Book (1845). One rule governed the taking: expressions could be skipped, but all expressions were taken moving forward, not back up the alphabetical entries.
Rogers’s Telegraph Dictionary was an early, pre-commercial code for use with Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph, which had gone into service only the year before. Like subsequent commercial cable codes, it is arranged much like a thesaurus, in which expressions are grouped around key words. All plaintext expressions in books of this nature were selected for their utility in specific activities.
Such codes offered secrecy and – most importantly – data compression.
16 May 2012
tags: mutilation odes