Does anyone out there know what a haiku is?
Why yes, yes, we learned it in school. It's a Japanese poetic form consisting of seventeen syllables, divided into three lines of five, seven and five syllables.
Wrong, fool, it's a Japanese poetic form consisting of seventeen Japanese syllables, etc, etc, etc. What you learned about in school was a completely pointless exercise in attempting to transfer a verse form which makes sense in its native language into a language in which it doesn't make sense. Japanese doesn't have word stresses in the way in which English does, and all the words in in vowels, so the concepts of rhythmic metre and rhyme are pretty alien. Conversely, Japanese syllables are well-defined and unalterable, while English ones are often ambiguous and elided. Furthermore, I read on the internet that classical Japanese haiku actually have (rather like the Welsh englyn) many other restrictions on their form, so it is actually quite difficult to compose one which sticks rigidly to the rules. In English, the answer to the question "can you compose a haiku?" is basically the answer to the question "can you count?"
the eloquently irascible and quasi-polymathic D-squared Digest
link from Busy Busy Busy, home of fine shortening
{People are outraged because they care, Mencken cared, that's why he wrote about the things he despised, because they assaulted the things he didn't.}
