The Friday Fillip

Believe it or not, but legal prose can be turbid, turgid and really quite impenetrable. It can, it can. (It might be fun to share our own favourite “paragraph of shame” from lawyerly or judicial — okay, okay, or legal academic — writing, a Slaw version of the “It was a dark and stormy night” contest.)

But if you want to have a good laugh and shake your head at some seriously bad writing, take the Postmodernism Text Generator for a spin. It’s a marvelous machine that can generate horribly lifelike swatches of Foucaultian or Lacanian prose all wrapped up in the guise of an academic article. Here’s an excerpt:

“Society is fundamentally a legal fiction,” says Lacan; however, according to Werther[2] , it is not so much society that is fundamentally a legal fiction, but rather the fatal flaw, and some would say the futility, of society. The paradigm, and subsequent collapse, of Marxism which is a central theme of Gaiman’s Neverwhere emerges again in Stardust, although in a more self-justifying sense. In a sense, the premise of postdialectic Marxism holds that art is part of the absurdity of reality.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been sentenced privileged to read poststructuralist writings, but if so, you’ll appreciate how uncannily accurate this machine-made language is.

Kick the reload button for another iteration, completely different and always and everywhere the same.

If for some reason you tire of reading pomo, give the Sub-Genius Brag Generator a go.

I’m so ugly the Speed of Light can’t slow me down and Gravity won’t tug at my cuffs! I drank *Mother Nature* under 13 tables, I am too *radioactive* to die, I’m insured for acts o’ God *and* Satan! I make a *spectacle* of myself. I *cannot* be tracked on radar! YEE! YEEE! I’m a bacteriological weapon, I am *armed* and *loaded*! Now give me some more of…