You might not know this, but if your latest tweet was written in iambic pentameter, it might just get picked up by Pentametron, a Twitter bot turning random posts into poetry.
Without even realizing it it, users often write
their tweets in iambic pentameter.
Enthusiast Ranjit Bhatnagar has
created Pentametron, the online robot to re-tweet these as rhyming
couplets.
If your public tweets fit into the ten-syllable, alternating-stress
meter which was commonly used by Shakespeare, it can quite possibly end
up on Pentametron's website as poetry, without you ever knowing it.
The rhymed tweets first appear on Pentametron's public Twitter account. Then they also appear on the Pentametron website.
Here we have a perfect example. The tweets are picked up on Twitter and appear on Pentametron's Twitter feed as follows:
And here is how the poetic couplets appear on Pentametron's website:
Gawker is reporting that
the robot uses only plain text, and removes all emoticons and smileys.
Then the robot checks the pronunciation of each word with the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Basically, if the tweet is in iambic pentameter, Pentametron retweets it; if not, it moves on.
Bhatnagar told Gawker that he is always looking for ways to brighten up
his life. "I always find some new funny or accidentally profound thing
there to enjoy," he said.
"It's fascinating to me that … one of the most popular sites just moves
words around… One of the goals of Pentametron is to show how weird and
interesting this giant flood of language is," he added.
And fascinating it is. The writer wonders how many of you readers are
immediately trying to tweet in iambic pentameter, and checking to see
the results!
The latest couplet came out just perfectly:
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