Editing Blog/2025-10-12/Word Magic (section)

=== Unsong's Playful Approach ===

Some of the Unsong jokes are just straightforward puns like this, played for a joke in-universe, and they're fun to read.

{{Blockquote
|text=“Hmmmm,” said weird-hair-girl, and she made a show of thinking about it. “I’ve got one. How long did Joseph spend in the belly of the whale?”

“Three days and three nights,” he said practically instantly, before I could warn him.

“Oh, so sorry,” said weird-hair-girl.

David looked at her. “I can quote you chapter and verse. Jonah 1:17.”

“…would be a lovely answer, if I’d asked that. I asked you how long Joseph was in the belly of the whale.”

The rabbi trap had been sprung. His face turned red.

“Uh,” he said, “there’s nothing in the Bible saying for sure that Joseph didn’t spend time in a whale too.”

“Nope,” said weird-hair-girl. “I’m no rabbi, but I am pretty sure that zero, zilch, nobody in the Bible spent time in a whale except Jonah.”

“And the wives of the men slain in Sennacherib’s invasion of Jerusalem,” I interjected before I could stop myself.

Two sets of eyes suddenly pivoted my direction.

“The wives of the men slain in Sennacherib’s invasion of Jerusalem,” said David, “did not spend time in a whale.”

“Oh, they absolutely did,” I said, because at this point I was in too deep to back out. “They were very vocal about it.”

Weird-hair-girl raised one eyebrow.

“It’s all in Byron,” I said, then quoted: “And the widows of Ashur were loud in their whale.”
|author=Scott Alexander
|title=Unsong
|source=Chapter 5<ref name=whale-pun/>
}}

But also, there are the other word-play world-building jokes like the word form M-L-K reappearing through history starting with Melekh (King) all the way to Martin Luther King (MLK twice over, initials and last name). These are fun little ways of drawing a thread through history to create this world where all these references are repeating and fractal and represent this universe where words matter in a magical way. For example

{{Blockquote
|text=The timer read 4:33, which is the length of John Cage’s famous silent musical piece. 4:33 makes 273 seconds total. -273 is absolute zero in Celsius. John Cage’s piece is perfect silence; absolute zero is perfect stillness. In the year 273 AD, the two consuls of Rome were named Tacitus and Placidianus; “Tacitus” is Latin for “silence” and Placidianus is Latin for “stillness”. 273 is also the gematria of the Greek word eremon, which means “silent” or “still”. None of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
|author=Scott Aaronson
|title=Unsong
|source=Chapter 1, Dark Satanic Mills<ref name=dsm/>
}}