Can anybody think of an example of a hack in the sense of programming, but in a piece of writing? (Ie not hack as in bad writing, but clever expedient use of words possibly with subversive intent)
Only one I can think of is DFW’s Consider the Lobster om.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/magazine/2000s
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surprised nobody mentioned puns, which strike me as the classic way to trojan horse one meaning through another. this isn't *writing* per se but it's fun to consider:
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A thread of Chinese internet nicknames for NBA players.
China is crazy for the NBA, but official sources use boring phonetic transcriptions, failing to take advantage of Chinese characters having both sound and meaning. Chinese netizens have "improved" on these official names.
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Roger Zelazny's hobby of occasionally putting a page-long grammatically correct sentence in a piece (most memorably in Lord of Light) comes to mind
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Octet, also by DFW. also any Guy de Maupassant story. But I don't like writing hacks so much
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I tend to think of Raymond Carver as a "hack" in this sense. It's easy to understand how he achieved certain effects when you look back at the text with a critical eye. But the effects are disarming.
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which brings to mind the story of how the censored line "I want to have your abortion" in the original script of Fight Club was replaced with "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school", which i guess resulted in the censors just cutting their losses
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turn the zero point camera upon yourself, you never see anything else anyway







