The American poet Jonathan Williams surely sowed high mischief, not to mention irony, when he gave the following title to one of his volumes of verse: No-No Nse-Nse.
Rearranged, these words reveal: No Nonsense.
I discovered this only recently and, to my surprise, found that JW coined the word “Meta-Fours” early in the 1990s. I staked a claim to the coining of Meta-Fours some years after that, and so must now relinquish that claim.
True, my stipulated meaning of meta-fours differs considerably from what Williams means by the term, but he came up with the word first.
By meta-fours, Williams means a verse form he invented that has four words in each line. Here are two examples:
estimated acres of forest
henry david thoreau burned
down in 1844 trying
to cook fish he’d
caught for dinner 300
two jewish ladies meet
in central park one
of them has a
new baby in a
carriage what’s the baby’s
name says one it’s
shelley says the other
how nice that you
named her after a
famous poet shelley temple
was a famous poet