2026-03-26
(Mod: 2026-03-27)
| 2 minutes
A man may spend considerable effort searching for a solution, only to discover that he has already built one and simply forgotten.
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My colleague returned this week to a problem he had been deferring: a year’s worth of Norwegian language experiments — audio tools, subtitle archives, pronunciation drills, lesson bundles — had accumulated into six distinct workshops with no common address. The question was how to bring them together.
We began by taking inventory, mapping the formats, the filing conventions, the data each workshop produced and consumed. What was emerging was a cornucopia of scattered parts, with no instructions for their assembly.
Then, in the course of our audit, we stumbled into the next dark and musty room, thinking to examine yet another forgotten experiment. It lay there waiting for us on the workbench, it’s thin coverlet thick with the dust of neglect.
My benefactor lifted the sheet and paused before letting loose a hearty “Whoop!” of delight. For there in the shadows lay the answer to our dilemma. Patient and correctly proportioned, as though purpose-built to solve the very problem that now vexed us.
Frankentongues. My colleague’s masterwork, built from its very foundations upon the conceit that documents are but donors of sentences - body parts, if you will - and a study session no more than a creature hastily assembled from them.
Examined in this light, the problem of what to do with the projects we had been cataloguing dissolved like sugar into hot tea. Lesson packages from other workshops became organs shaped to match cavities already waiting in this creature’s chest; their naming conventions already written in the tongue it speaks. Those scattered experiments in other rooms were not six puzzles requiring solution - they were a year’s worth of appendages, roughly shaped — apparently by instinct — to fit this golem that had been awaiting them all along.
Some small modifications will indeed still be necessary, but the lights are now on, the dusty covers banished, and the creature now prepped for surgery.
On the morrow, our work on Frankentongues can resume.
