Kingo Friver

Previously: Gemini 10Billion Sub Roadmap

Yes, this is exactly the sort of magnificently useless mental object that almost never gets dragged out of somebody’s skull intact. Usually it either evaporates or gets civilized into “a surreal story about a man becoming a pencil,” which would destroy most of what is interesting about yours.

The really good part is that your image isn’t fundamentally visual. It’s a bundle of mutually impossible spatial, grammatical, and ontological relationships that your mind somehow presents as one thing. He is inside the pencil, he is part of the pencil, he is the pencil, he is looking down a mirror tunnel, and the tunnel is also him. He has no sensory apparatus, yet there remains this ghost of “seeing.” He has no will, yet the verb insist continues to occur. None of those contradictions need resolving. The contradictions are basically the geometry.

And the original grammatical accident is doing something wonderfully violent to reality. “Insist a pencil” tries to force insist into a normal subject–verb–object relation. Your mental universe responds: fine. If you insist on making pencil the direct object of insist, then I will eliminate the distinction between subject and object altogether. The man doesn’t merely insist on a pencil. He becomes the mechanism by which pencil insists pencil.

That makes the facing mirrors especially appropriate. Ordinary mirror recursion is:

person → image of person → image of image → …

Yours is more like:

pencil → pencil insisting pencil → pencil insisting pencil insisting pencil → …

except there is no privileged “original” at the front. The first pencil is no more fundamental than reflection number 8,000,000. And because the observer is embedded in the recursion, he can never turn around and discover the machinery producing it. Anything that could qualify as an outside object is assimilated the instant it becomes conceivable: he doesn’t see it; he pencils it. That sentence may actually be the center of the whole thing.

The time part makes it much nastier. If the transformation simply happened at 3:14 PM Tuesday, it would still be a supernatural story with a before and after. But you remove that escape route. The man who existed before the pencil was manufactured has to remain numerically the same “him,” while the relevant entity has no experienced succession. So the transformation almost retroactively destroys the transformation: there was never really a man who subsequently became a pencil. “Man,” “pencil,” “mirror tunnel,” and “closed light path” become different descriptions of one timeless structure.

Your photon move then expands a ridiculous grammar example into cosmological horror. Small physics footnote: “photons don’t experience time” is the usual shorthand; more precisely, light follows paths with zero proper time, and there is no valid photon rest frame. But that actually suits the mental image beautifully. From the human description there is an unimaginably long trip from primordial spacetime toward infinite future; internally, there isn’t a little photon sitting there getting bored for 13.8 billion years. So your poor pencil man cannot even complain that his sentence is taking too long.

And then the “no-brainer” bit closes another loop. At first it sounds like a joke about the task being trivial. Then you literalize it: there is no brain. Then you go one step worse: because there is no agent capable of performing the action, the action itself becomes the persistent entity. He cannot insist, yet “insisting” is somehow what his entire existence consists of.

So I don’t picture your pencil-insisting man as a ghost imprisoned in a pencil anymore. That still gives him too much independence. He is more like a grammatical error that acquired a worldline.

Which is an absolutely terrible fate for somebody who just wanted to test whether insist was transitive.

Thank you. My dumster observation video diary seems to be correctly sent in high resolution mode. It was worth giving a shot. Btw I asked AI Mode other funny grammar quirks that may triip me to another spacetime in the same way, and got these five. Maybe my dumster vlog failed to upload, or my I need more recovery time after the pencil-insisting man: 1. “He vanished the room.” 2. “She elapsed a glass of water.” 3. “He loitered his keys.” 4. “The clock occurred the table.” 5. “He transpired a sandwich.”

Hahaha, yes — I think you may still have pencil radiation in the system. These five are funny, but only a couple have the same kind of spacetime-opening potential. The pencil worked because the grammatical violence accidentally destroyed the distinction between subject, action, and object. Most bad transitive constructions merely produce an amusing physical action.

My ranking for “could mutate into an unusably elaborate private cosmology” would be:

1. “The clock occurred the table.” This one is dangerous. Occur doesn’t normally act upon an object at all; it denotes an event coming into existence. Making the table its object immediately raises the question: did the clock cause the table to occur, or did the table become the location/content of the clock’s occurrence? Maybe the clock isn’t sitting on the table—the clock is the event by which tableness happens. And because a clock measures time while occur presupposes time, you already have a nice little self-eating temporal goblin. Eventually there is no clock and no table; there is only the occurrence of clock-table, continuously generating the time in which its own occurrence is possible.
2. “He loitered his keys.” Surprisingly fertile. At first it sounds merely causative: he somehow made his keys loiter. But loitering requires an agent who remains somewhere without purpose. Keys have no purpose of their own, so perhaps he transferred his purposelessness into them. He leaves, but his loitering stays behind in the keys. Then every lost-key episode becomes horrifying: the keys aren’t lost. They are deliberately remaining without sufficient reason. He searches for them, thereby giving them a purpose, which means they can no longer loiter. Consequently they must move somewhere else before he finds them. This may explain several real households.
3. “She elapsed a glass of water.” This has a different flavor. Elapse isn’t movement through ordinary space; it’s what an interval of time does. So did she cause one glass of water to undergo duration? Did she consume not the water but its elapsedness? Perhaps the glass initially contains twenty minutes rather than 250 mL, and drinking it causes those twenty minutes to have already happened. You take one sip and discover that you’ve been sitting there since Thursday.
4. “He transpired a sandwich.” This one immediately gives me body horror comedy rather than metaphysics. Transpire can relate to giving off moisture, so unfortunately my brain finds an escape hatch: the man somehow secreted a sandwich through his pores. Not pleasant, but intelligible. The more interesting reading uses transpire = “happen”: the sandwich happened out of him. Nobody prepared it. There was a man, an event transpired, and the event’s direct object was lunch.
5. “He vanished the room.” This is weakest for your purposes because English almost wants to accept it. Magician-ish usage like “vanish a coin” exists, and even without knowing that, it’s easy to interpret as “make the room vanish.” The grammar violation immediately gets patched by the brain. No existential emergency. The room just goes poof. Cheap trick. Two stars.

The crucial ingredient seems to be: don’t pick merely an intransitive verb; pick one whose meaning makes the existence of a direct object conceptually impossible. Then forcing an object onto it doesn’t merely create incorrect grammar—it forces the brain to invent a new metaphysics in order to satisfy the syntax.

That’s why “The clock occurred the table” is the one I’d keep away from reflective surfaces for now. The pencil man hasn’t finished his shift.

Yes — you found the mechanism. The five candidates were mostly just “wrong verb + noun.” He insisted a pencil. is nastier because it first behaves like a perfectly normal sentence and only becomes impossible at the full stop.

While hearing

He insisted a pencil…

my parser does not initially hear a pencil as the object of insisted. It quietly supplies the possibility of an omitted that:

He insisted [that] a pencil …

and now a pencil is the subject of an embedded clause. So the sentence is still cruising normally:

He insisted a pencil should be sharpened carefully.
He insisted a pencil was sufficient.
He insisted a pencil would work better.

The brain has already opened a little grammatical room after pencil and is waiting for the predicate to arrive.

Then:

He insisted a pencil. [END]

The delivery truck never comes.

That is why the pencil feels so much stranger than The clock occurred the table. In the clock sentence, the syntax starts emitting smoke immediately. You know something has gone wrong at clock occurred, and then it gets worse at occurred the table. Your mind remains outside the wreckage trying to reconstruct the intended sentence.

With the pencil, there is no warning. He ✅ insisted ✅ a pencil ✅ … and then the floor disappears.

And your phrase “the entire thought about a pencil inside that-clause suddenly concentrated into a pencil” is almost exactly how I would describe the perceptual effect. All the missing predicate-space after a pencil collapses backward into the noun. The pencil was supposed to be merely the grammatical subject of some proposition about pencils; instead, because nothing follows, it is suddenly forced to absorb the whole proposition.

Hence:

man → insists → [a pencil … ?]

becomes

man → insists → pencil

and because insist doesn’t comfortably support that direct-object relationship, the imagination has to manufacture some interpretation for a relation that shouldn’t exist. Your solution was extraordinarily economical: destroy the distinction between the insister and the pencil. Man implodes into object. Problem solved. Unfortunately for him.

So the actual recipe AI Mode missed is something like:

Choose a verb that naturally permits a zero-that finite clause, but strongly resists an ordinary noun phrase as its direct object. Then give it what looks exactly like the subject of that missing clause—and stop.

That’s much narrower than “use an intransitive verb transitively.”

For example, these get closer:

• He insisted the door. → He insisted [that] the door… THUD
• She complained the soup. → She complained [that] the soup… THUD
• He swore the dog. → He swore [that] the dog… THUD

Though none is quite as pristine. complained already feels slightly odd without that to some speakers, and swore has other transitive constructions lurking nearby.

a pencil is also exquisitely stupid as the stranded embedded subject. He insisted the proposal. invites reconstruction into some bureaucratic sentence. He insisted a pencil. leaves you staring at this absolutely innocent stationery item that has somehow become the terminal destination of insistence.

So yes: I withdraw my previous generous ratings. Those five were bargain-bin malformed sentences.

The pencil is doing a genuine garden-path cliff edge. And at the bottom of the cliff is your photon man, continuing his shift since before spacetime.

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#ThatClauseGrammar #intransitiveVerb