Antartificial speech is not compiled
as is programmed computer code;
granted, it does have a grammar,
but it is not, as a rule, rigorous—
nor enforced at the time the words
intended for end users are composed.
Code, by contrast, conforms to specs
and cannot but execute precisely:
the compiler processes programs
to ensure that digital correlates
of prepositions do not dangle,
modifiers are not misplaced,
a complement is not a compliment.
Yet if code does compile correctly
even then its execution is not failsafe:
the program design must always account
for input which falls outside the bounds
of variables which have been declared;
e.g., code which scans batches of eggs
needs to gracefully handle “thirteen”
as our CPUs intuit no baker’s dozens.
Some software languages are written
to check variable boundaries when run,
ensuring that mistaken user input
leads not to a blue-screen demise;
such runtime libraries in humanospeaks
would be useful for heated exchanges
with a garrulouspouse in the wake
of one’s disastroviz with the in-laws
on the Christmas after Oma’s death.
Compilers, programmed by sapients,
are enabled to clearly differentiate
between “safe regions” of code
(where bounds need not be checked)
and those which Alan Turing, et al.,
ken cannot count on integrous intent—
a conceipt which their semanticists
have never begun to truly grasp.
But computers are finitely bound
by the programs written for them
even should the code yield intelligence
of our allegedly artifarcical variety:
a chatbot which exhibits learning
did not learn to learn on its own;
said bot simply japes its maker.
Are you mazed more by rows-o’-bots
than by the heigh novelty of Chaucer,
the foison of words Shakespeare coined,
John Milton’s minted Pandemonium,
the mimsy nonces of Lewis Carroll—
verily, these bespawned sans ChatGPT?
Ideas are to zygotes
what words are to bairns.
Hence: post-war computation
birthed a complexicon
of bits and RAM and EPROM
software and machine code
compilers and assemblers
programs and processors;
and when Mennonite
women’s vocabulary
was stripped of terms
for progenital truths
they could not convey
the violate experience
of tranquilized communal
rape and molestation.
Yet when need arises
so also will the words:
why mint murmuration
before one is heard?
When one is witnessed
will it be soon forgot?
No; onomatopoetics
succeed the memory.
We dare not believe
our glossaries cradle
all the verbal offspring
of imagined nations;
so long I to write
aweighted words
of unbound thoughts
from unsafe regions.