Here are the originals of the Chaucer and Shakespeare quotations I mangled:<\/p>\r\n
\r\nWhan that Aprill with his shoures soote
\r\nThe droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
\r\nAnd bathed every veyne in swich licour
\r\nOf which vertu engendred is the flour;
\r\nWhan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
\r\nInspired hath in every holt and heeth
\r\nThe tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
\r\nHath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
\r\nAnd smale foweles maken melodye,
\r\nThat slepen al the nyght with open ye
\r\n(So priketh hem nature in hir corages),
\r\nThanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
\r\nAnd palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
\r\nTo ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
\r\nAnd specially from every shires ende
\r\nOf Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
\r\nThe hooly blisful martir for to seke,
\r\nThat hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\nAnd:<\/p>\r\n
\r\nTo be, or not to be, that is the question:\u2014
\r\nWhether 'tis nobler in the mind, to suffer
\r\nThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune;
\r\nOr to take arms against a sea of troubles,
\r\nAnd by opposing end them?\u2014To die,\u2014to sleep,
\r\nNo more;\u2014and, by a sleep, to say we end
\r\nThe heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
\r\nThat flesh is heir to,\u2014'tis a consummation
\r\nDevoutly to be wish'd. To die,\u2014to sleep:\u2014
\r\nTo sleep! perchance to dream:\u2014ay, there's the rub;
\r\nFor in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
\r\nWhen we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
\r\nMust give us pause.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\u2014Hamlet<\/cite>, II.ii.56-68<\/p>\r\n\r\n
Procedural details<\/h3>\r\n
I took the original texts, used a Perl script to reverse them letter-by-letter, and ran them through both the FrameMaker 5.1 spellchecker, and the Word 4 spellchecker (on the Macintosh). Where their suggestions differed, I went with whichever I liked best. (The FrameMaker spellchecker is almost too good to use in this procedure; for a short reversed word, its first suggestion is usually the original word.)<\/p>\r\n
I usually avoided proper nouns where possible. Usually I took the first improper suggestion offered, but sometimes went further down the suggestion list to use the first word I knew, or once in a while for a word I simply liked more. Punctuation, of course, is entirely by me, which provided a lot of flexibility.<\/p>\r\n
I had a bit of trouble with \"consummation\": I mistyped it as \"ocnsummation,\" which reversed to \"noitammusnco\" (for which FrameMaker came up with the delightful \"incommunicado\"), but when I noticed the mistake and spellchecked the correct reversal, neither checker offered any suggestions. So I stuck with the mistake; and on the return trip, discovered that neither spellchecker had any idea for \"odacinummocni\" either. After trying various variations, I finally split it into two words.<\/p>\r\n
Finally, I wasn't satisfied with \"bur\" but there were no other options offered. My dictionary lists \"bur\" as a variant spelling of \"burr,\" so I corrected it.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3-llowercase-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2600"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3319,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2600\/revisions\/3319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}