Welcome to the Plathinator. It should be obvious who it is named after. The Plathinator is an expert system which we rely upon to generate a new, unique, depressing and spooky poem for each and every visitor to cold cold dot com. It does this all day long, every day of every year, and will continue to do so for ever and ever and ever. Sigh.
The Plathinator is programmed to provide further entertainment whenever a visitor hits the "again" button.
Last Plathinator update: 5/28/2004
All output is copyright Benz 2004 all rights reserved.
All output is thoroughly random. If the Plathinator somehow generates a bright and happy poem, please forward it to the webmaster immediately so he may seek out and repair whatever has gone horribly horribly wrong to cause such an event.
The Plathinator was built by parsing about ten or twelve poems by Sylvia Plath into their component grammatical elements. Words were seperated and counted. For example, all the singular nouns were put into a singular noun file for later use. Adverbs were put in an adverb file, plural nouns into a plural noun file, etc. Using a complex script, the Plathinator recombines words randomly selected from these files to build fresh despair.
It may seem strange on the face of it, but Plath did use quite a few cheerful words in her poetry here and there. These words were yanked during the parsing process. In an effort to avoid outright theft, a couple hundred depressing words of our own choosing were added to the Plathinator. It was barely neccessary though, because Sylvia Plath had an impressively diverse vocabulary. It is almost as if she kept track of what words she had used already so she wouldn't use them in a new poem. It's uncanny. Out of the ten or so poems I parsed, Sylvia came up with about 260 different verbs, 481 unique nouns, 237 unique adjectives, and 37 different adverbs. The overwhelming bulk of these words were used only once (excepting, of course: articles, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions.)
On the other hand, it was possible at the end to tell which few words Plath actually favored. She was into body parts and colors. A full 5 of the ten favorite nouns listed here were body parts. Of the adjectives, four out of the top five were colors.
A list of Sylvia Plath's favorite words.
Favorite Verbs: bear, think, touch, marry, fall.
Favorite Singluar Nouns: hair, moon, eyelid, wall, god
Favorite Plural Nouns: women, stars, lips, fingers, eyes
Favorite Adjectives: black, blue, white, cold, red
Favorite Adverbs: quickly, away.
Of these words, the noun 'hair' tied the adjective 'black' for being the most popular with Plath.
