Acrostics, mesostics and trash metal

If you are still unclear as to what an acrostic is, the first two sentences of the definition given by Wordsmith.org (found here on Answers.com) may help dissipate any remaining ambiguity:

An acrostic is not an angry insect ("a cross tick"), any more than an oxymoron is a big dumb cow. Rather, an acrostic is a poem, in which the first letter of each line spells out a word.

This definition actually debunks two deeply rooted assumptions that I had concerning dictionaries:

• Isn't it unusual for a dictionary to start defining a word by what it does not mean?
• Would you have ever thought it possible to turn to a dictionary for comic relief? I thought humor — if at all present — could only reside in the citations used to illustrate the definition of a word in context.

This may just be that Wordsmith.org is not a conventional dictionary. As refreshing as it may be, this definition could be amended a little. Poems are indeed the preferred embodiment for acrostics, because of their mostly fixed layout, but Arnold Schwarzenegger's letter can be added to a long line of texts in prose which benefit from a two-dimensional reading. Among the more elegant and recent is Linton Weeks's farewell review in the Washington Post.

In both examples, the "hidden" message was meant to be discovered by everyone. A variant of the acrostic and a more effective cryptographic pattern is the mesostic, which also has you look for subtext by reading the text vertically. While acrostics rely on the first letter of each line, mesostics use the middle of each line.

Do you remember how we were supposed to be able to hear the voice of the devil by playing trash metal tracks backwards?

Poetry on the margin

I doubt the poetic figure called acrostic has ever had more exposure in the press than these past few days. Thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger, of all people, acrostics are now all the rage — kind of.

Google trends shows a surge in the number of Google searches as well as news articles about acrostics in the last week of October:

This sudden interest for the poetic figure coincides with the Governor of California's f-bomb, cleverly hidden in a veto letter addressed to the Members of the California State Assembly, among whom Assemblyman Tom Ammiano. In turn, Ammiano encapsulated a coded message in his response to the governor ("A Message on the Margin"). Is that the beginning of a new mind game for political writers?

The following graph shows that the trend setter and his message are still 6 times "trendier" than the form used to convey it.

The revival of acrostics may well be short lived...