[B5JMS] JMS: How many words?

[b5jms at cs.columbia.edu]

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From: janmschroeder at aol.com (Jan)
Date: 22 May 2003 00:20:09 GMT
Lines: 32

JMS,

Ah, sometimes it's *nice* to be a reader!  JMS brings me words like
'specificity'; Spider Robinson gives me 'antimony' and 'syntony'.  Life is
good.

And then....lest one become too complacent, the new TV Zone arrives with Joe's
memoirs about the second season.  What does he do?  He seems to have a contest
with himself to see just how many words he can stuff into a sentence and still
make perfect, hilarious sense!  And in his inimitable way, he sneaks up on you
with them.  First paragraph there's a fairly innocuous 26 word sentence. 
Nothing to be afraid of, right?  Second paragraph there's a whopper of an 84
word sentence (or is it 58? I never know how to count the stuff in the
parentheses..).  But then....just when you're about to relax, along comes a
real doozy!  JMS writes an entire long paragraph that is *one* single solitary
sentence of a mammoth 192 words!  No, I didn't sit there and count them myself.
 That's why god created Word, isn't it?  Although if I were to count it the way
that I was taught in Typing class, it would equal 29 words, 93 (or is it 63?)
and 209 respectively.  There are others but I didn't want to transcribe the
entire thing into Word just so it could count for me.

So, Joe.  Is that your record?  I'm betting that you know. If not, what was
your longest in and where can I find it?

Can you tell I thought it was a fun article (even before I started counting
words)?  Thanks much!

Jan
(A bookeeper, finally employed.  Does it show? )




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From: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
Date: 24 May 2003 23:51:25 GMT
Lines: 22

>So, Joe.  Is that your record?  I'm betting that you know. If not, what was
>your longest in and where can I find it?

...eep.

Don't know, never thought about it, never counted it.  It's something I do once
in a while for effect, because there's something nicely breathless about a
run-on sentence, and the goal is to keep it totally grammatically correct, so
it's a challenge to be sure, but I've never actually gone so far as to do a
word count.


 jms

(jmsatb5 at aol.com)
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