Infinite Digression

Adjacent characters Aesthetics

modified:Dec 12, 20245 min read

created, $=dv.current().file.ctime & modified, =this.modified tags:words Words related: Neologistic Error Words lol

In Neologistic Error Words I noted the beauty of the misspelt discovered word “lyyrical”. The word, in totality, is attractive but I honed in on the “lyyr” and then then “lyyr” and then

Thought

That’s actually a fun activity. Like a beautiful decomposition in binaries. start: lyyr-ical I find lyyr more attractive than ical In the lyyr fragment, I find lyy better (it actually has a suffix-y endword-y-ness to it) But the root of my attraction is yy (though now I have doubts, ly is beautiful and “free” too like an adverb without the verbslowly slow ly )

Thought

I’m also noticing, strangely when writing the imaginary word lyyrical, I keep writing lyrrical. I’m duplicating the wrong character! That yy is resistant, because it is so uncommon that I have to be more conscious of it, or I’ll just resort to the usual and much more common rr (which is obviously still incorrect, with the correct spelling lyrical)

Lyrical itself might have inherent beauty.

Anyway, this yy has me wondering the most attractive same character pair. I hypothesized the yy was this for me so I’ll test this.

lowercase

    const alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz';
    alphabet.split('').forEach(c=> console.log(c+c));
    
    aa, bb, cc, dd, ee, ff, gg, hh, ii, jj, kk, ll,
    mm, nn, oo, pp, qq, rr, ss, tt, uu, vv, ww, xx,
    yy, 
    zz

I’ll sort through my thoughts on paper here in real time.

ee is the strongest on the first line, but there also feels the urge to slide a character between, such as eue or ece. I feel this is tantalizing and a wonder of flexibility, but the most beautiful pair in this exercise should standalone. aa bb cc some of these are weak. kk could have been nice, but suffers from some internet use connotations. There’s something to ii jj ll trio but only one must survive. I’d pick jj out of the bunch, as it has the qualities of i and l but then brings style of its own with that sweep.

I’m suddenly realizing a flaw in my methodology here. I didn’t consider uppercase pairs. I’ll have to address this. I understood that I wasn’t speaking broadly of all duplicated characters (%% etc) to constrain this search.

There’s also a host of diacritics to address, fuck. ýý

oo has a comical texture to it. qq as well, but with a kind of directional gaze and urgency. (This is another facet, directionality of the pair. xx oo not really having direction, kk with rightward focus, and dd with leftward) xx feels independent of one another, like the x resists adjacency. (This could be another quality to evaluate.)

zz I can’t distance from the buzz it would produce. (This could be another facet, the sound they’d make - many like buzzing, never arriving at a word.)

And back to the yy. There is directionality, but they settle into one another like lovers resting.

I wonder how many of these are unix commands?

Uppercase

    const alphabet = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';
    alphabet.split('').forEach(c=> console.log(c+c));
    
    AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, FF, GG, HH, II, JJ, KK, LL,
    MM, NN, OO, PP, QQ, RR, SS, TT, UU, VV, WW, XX,
    YY, 
    ZZ

Initial impressions, lowercase is more beautiful than uppercase (ee cummings).

The YY here is diminished in feel, despite its physical growth but still is a strong pair. QQ is fairly strong but also so is qq I could theorize that case is preserving the relative aesthetic positions (so a strong lowercase pair, results in a relatively strong uppercase pair)

I’m wonder if I paired the pairs now, like fathers looking upon sons.

nn NN or rr RR, there might be something to this grouping.

Trios

Quick final test

aaa, bbb, ccc, ddd, eee, fff, ggg, hhh, iii, jjj, kkk, lll,
mmm, nnn, ooo, ppp, qqq, rrr, sss, ttt, uuu, vvv, www, xxx,
yyy, 
zzz

It happened here. Something was lost with yyy I feel. This could be pointing back to a strength in the pair, and its importance. Any further added and it breaks. Any less and it dissolves.

Can I try YyY - no, not better. Nor yYy but I like it somewhat. Yyy yes, this is slightly better as a trio but still worse. yyY this is worse than the later.

Also these trios now are taking shape in a Three, Rule of three kind of way. There’s more semantic attachment outside of what we were previously somewhat evaluating (some relatively “intrinsic” quality of beauty). We see the sleepy zzz. We see the shocked ooo, the fff- of a stubbed toe, the sleaze of xxx.

Thought

This last statement, I am not sure. I was reaching for some beauty, after finding it in yy like it was intrinsic and alien to just the characters. But there were all of these external attachments to things that were criteria for evaluation. Would I be swayed by others? Why did different senses and sounds occur to me? Why objects? Why names?

Breakdowns

I’m also curious of general breakdowns. Like “impossible” - what is the most favored unit?

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