The designers from Other Means in Brooklyn, NYC led a workshop where we were tasked as a class to individually reinterpret the sections of the first edition of The American Language by H.L. Mencken. The American Language was the first comprehensive study of the characteristics of American English, how it differed from English English, and made the case for American to be thought of not only as a dialect but as its own language. We worked to use the material in the book to investigate typographic dialect.

Inspired by the section of Euphemisms and Forbidden Words, I began to investigate how something could be so impossibly good that it could only be described by a word traditionally carrying a negative connotation. Pushing this idea further, I came up with a list of words that when employed in a sentence form a less racy version of the typical double entendre. The result was a series of phrases that could be read a number of ways depending on the context, tone, and mood of the reader.