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Saturday, August 29, 2020

Taproot

Remember when you were in elementary school, and kids would taunt one another by saying things like, "In the dictionary under 'stupid,' there is a picture of you"? 

Well, I'm actually in the dictionary now. Or, at least, a line from one of my poems is an example sentence for the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary for the word 'taproot.' Better hurry if you want to see it though, because it seems like the dictionary has an algorithm that plucks these example sentences from recent publications. Who knows how long 'recent' lasts. 

How did this happen? Well, I'm not sure but my guess is that Scientific American, the publication the poem appeared in, is on a list of publications that the dictionary's algorithm routinely pulls example sentences from. I bet they'd be surprised to find they've pulled a line of poetry--but then again, this is just my guess of how the process works. 

Anyway, it's kind of fun for now. (And I'm in the definition for 'madly' and 'black spruce' too, but it's the same line of poetry.)