From DEF - A long poem

Abstract

DEF starts from the seed of a sentence by Gottlob Frege: “On the introduction of a name for something simple, a definition is not possible; there is nothing for it but to lead the reader or hearer, by means of hints, to understand the words as is intended.”1 I replaced each word in Frege’s sentence with its dictionary definition. I then replaced each of the words in that new sentence with its dictionary definition, and so on. This procedure is an extended example of a proposal that Raymond Queneau called “definitional literature.”2 With a precedent in Stefan Themerson’s “semantic literature,” the form has previously been most fully exploited by Georges Perec and Marcel Bénabou.3 The excerpt published here is drawn from the fifth iteration of the process, using the Oxford English Dictionary. That entire fifth sentence is over forty-four thousand words long and—theoretically, if parsed in apposition—grammatically correct.