Food for thought

Vague words like smidgen, pinch and dash often show up in recipes and give the cook an opportunity to complete the recipe with their own interpretations of these terms. In computer science, beginners are often told that algorithms are like recipes but no algorithm will ever use these words without precisely defining them, e.g. a dash is 1/460 of a cup.

Once a friend, who has a Ph.D. in computer science, sent me a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that attempted to be algorithmic in its precision. For example, the dough for each cookie was the size of a golf ball. To achieve this it would be necessary to see how much water a golf ball displaced when immersed in water and then assure that each dough ball displaced the same amount of water.

But his recipe got sloppy near the end. It instructed me to place the dough balls on a cookie tin and cook them for a certain amount of time at a given temperature. Unfortunately it did not tell me how far apart to space them and I ended up with one giant cookie which I am sure is not what he intended.

I wonder if poets share this problem with recipe writers. Is the integrity of a poem lost if it is misread or is whatever survives of the intended meaning enough to enrich the reader in some way? My giant cookie was still a cookie that probably tasted exactly the same as the smaller versions did. This has given me food for thought.

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