What?!

I'll get to it. Right now, I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about double dactyls.

A long time ago, in 1951 (okay, so not that long ago I suppose), a couple of guys got really bored and decided to play a game. Now, back in 1951 there wasn't much interactive entertainment available, and even if you had a TV it was probably still in black and white, which is just boring. It most certainly did not have an Xbox attached (or even an Atari). So, what do you do for fun?

Well, apparently, these guys' idea of "fun" was sitting around and coming up with poems that adhered to a rather restrictive set of rules. The foremost and defining rule of the genre is that a double dactyl poem invariably comprises two four-line stanzas written in dactylic dimeter (that's a fancy poetry term for DAH-dah-dah DAH-dah-dah), except for the last line of each, which is a single choriamb (another fancy term, this time for DAH-dah-dah-DAH). Instead of listing all of the rules first, we'll take this example penned by one co-creator of the format, and use it as an example of the rules.

Higgledy piggledy, <-- 1st line must be "nonsense"
Benjamin Harrison, <-- 2nd line should be a proper noun
Twenty-third president
Was, and, as such,

Served between Clevelands and
Save for this trivial
Idiosyncrasy, <-- 7th line (usually): single unbroken word
Didn't do much.

_{Double dactyl written by John Hollander, co-creator of the double dactyl format.}

 
That's a lot of rules. But fear not, there's an even greater element of nuance here, because not only do those rules exist, but if you know that a double dactyl has already been made with your single unbroken word, you may never use it again. It's forever claimed for that double dactyl. If you want to check if your single unbroken word which observes dactylic dimeter has already been used, you can consult the book. No, really, these guys wrote an entire book full of these things. They literally had nothing better to do.

I am so glad I live in the future.

But what is this "bredlik" thing?

Getting there. So the double dactyl was lost to time and space. What happened was... people found better things to do! Or maybe it wasn't all that popular in the first place! Who knows? I don't. The point is though... making a game out of creatively stitching words together is a concept beyond which we've grown as a society.

Psych. Obviously. Or this post wouldn't exist. History has a way of repeating itself, friends.... and in October of 2016, that's exactly what happened. On an archaic, centralised social media platform called Reddit, a personality of non-negligible acclaim-- Sam Garland, better known as /u/poem_for_your_sprog-- had just finished reading a story about a health inspection gone terribly wrong, culminating in the bovine contamination of several loaves of Hive account@apsu bread. In response, he penned the following masterpiece:

my name is Cow,
and wen its nite,
or wen the moon
is shiyning brite,
and all the men
haf gon to bed -
i stay up late.
i lik the bred.

 
Now, if Sam Garland had lived in an earlier time, this work of art may have gone completely unnoticed by ninety-nine percent of the population and the format he created might have faded into obscurity. But as fate would have it, he hadn't, and it didn't.

Instead, it exploded. The bredlik, as the new format eventually came to be called, was an overnight sensation. The inaugral bredlik by Garland received at least six thousand upvotes in its first day. In the following months, an entire genre of poetry was created and memed across all the social networks of the world.

And then, it was gone. Nobody can know for sure when the bredlik craze came to an end, but it did. New examples are harder and harder to come by, and the format languishes in small enthusiast circles... but if you'd like, you can write one today, and submit it in Hive account@suesa's bredlik competition (deadline 21st April).

But how do I write one?

Well, just like double dactyls, there are some rules to be followed. I don't know as these have ever been officially codified by some international bredlik federation, but these rules are paraphrased from the ones in Hive account@suesa's contest, so they're good enough for me:

• eight lines total with four syllables each
• the meter is iambic dimeter (fancy poetry term for dah-DAH dah-DAH)
• the rhyming scheme is XAXAXBXB
• the last two lines should be a statement of action in the form "I / I the " (though this rule is often bent or broken).
• perhaps most uniquely: correct spellings should be avoided when possible, and phonetic spellings should be preferred (not faux-typos).

Rules are hard. Do you have any examples?

Why yes, I do! In fact, Hive account@reggaemuffin specifically requested that I make a post containing the bredliks I was spewing in chat the evening the contest started, as well as any of the potential entries I had written that didn't "make the cut." This is that post. So without further ado, here is my collection:

First, the one that started it all; the one I wrote for Hive account@suesa:

mai naem is sues
and wen i dreem
im offen think
of making steem
i rite a post
then click submit
den some one say
is post of shit

 
You'll notice that, as a general rule (heh), I don't really follow the rules about the punchline being two "I-" phrases. I was actually not made aware of that requirement (?) until my entry was submitted. Oh well. You can't win them all.

Next up, the one I wrote for Hive account@geekpowered:

my naem is geek
i hangs in chat
all day it seem
and faling that
im heer at nite
my mouse go clik
and also im
a monster dik

 
Some context for the last line: Hive account@geekpowered has, inexplicably it seems, chosen to represent himself to our platform as a bearded anthropomorphic penis (NSFW, obviously.)

Here's another one I wrote for GP, when he came up with a good punchline but was having trouble filling it in:

my naem is coin
i ryz up tall
and all the wale
they bild the wall
but chyna bans
get in ther hed
wall goe awai
i shit the bed

 
Here's one I wrote (and posted, on a dare from Hive account@suesa), as a reply to someone who didn't quite understand the rules of bredlik. It's also the one in which I bent those rules most liberally... pay attention at the end here:

im steemeran
i make haiku
its ease for me
an uthers two
but bredlik hard
brein hurt a lot
i get confuse
cucumber

 
Last, but certainly not least, is probably the one of which I am most proud. Unfortunately I came up with it after my entry into the contest, but I am fairly sure it would have won had I entered it:

my naem is Bred
an wen i rise
abuv the pan
up to the skies
i luk arownd
i no wut now
i find a farm
i lik the cow

 
I might post more of these on my Hive account@lemcriq account as I think of them. For now, that's all I've got. 🍋