Writers' know-how

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Christmas message from Writers' Know-how

Christmas at Selfridges, by Terry Freedman

The message

Unfortunately, my end-of-year message got a bit mangled, but I’m posting it here anyway. See if you can figure out what it is supposed to say. (Answer at the bottom of the page.)

Secretary-general's Grins! Horseman you have a good breather.


The solution

I used a particular Oulipo technique to process the original message. The technique I used is a variant of N + 7, in which every noun (N) is replaced by the noun that is 7 nouns along in the dictionary.

The variant I used is N + x, where x is any number you care to come up with. In this case it was 12. I’ve written more about this approach, along with considerations of necessary caveats, in the article:

A bang on the head -- N + 12

In the meantime, here’s what the message was originally:

ʞɐǝɹq pooƃ ɐ ǝʌɐɥ noʎ ǝdoH ¡sƃuıʇǝǝɹƃ s,uosɐǝS

I used Yaytext to create the upside-down text.


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