a genealogist’s sketchbook

Back in 1999 Chris Dickinson posted a fine piece of Internet performance art to the Usenet discussion list soc.genealogy.medieval. Beginning with the sentence “We are all descended from Charlemagne,” he funneled it through Babelfish dozens of times, bouncing among the various Western European languages. By the twenty-seventh line the sentence was twisted strangely:
All the goings […]