This week
- Lecture
- 1 March 2027 The dictionary as suspect
- Slides
- Open the deck
- Specimens
Fuck the duck until exploded
The merged character secondaryFuck Goods
The dried goods aisle secondary
Bench
- Material
- three outputs from one lookup
- Operation
- reconstructing the entry
- Leaves
- a dictionary entry someone else can break
You are given three signs. You do not get the dictionary. Write the entry.
The exercise
Work in pairs. Each pair gets outputs from the same source and reconstructs the lookup that produced them: the key, the senses under it, and the order they must have been in.
Then swap with another pair and try to break their entry with a fourth output they have not seen.
What we are looking for
Not the right answer — there is no key to check against, which is the condition this whole course works under. What the bench is looking for is whether you can separate the two kinds of sentence in your write-up: the sign says X and the table must have contained Y. The first is the artefact. The second is yours, and it is the part that can be wrong.
Afterwards
Keep the entry. In week 4 you will do the same exercise against a system that has no entries at all, and the contrast is the lesson.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have written a dictionary entry that would produce the output you were given
- you can name one output your reconstructed entry does not explain
- you have said which of your evidence is the artefact and which is your inference
Teaching team
- Aurel Marchetti — tutor