An “extra-large boomerang” was too big.
Not for the space I had to throw it in. For the ending of a post.
I was working with Kimiko-chan on a piece about improvements at work. Kimiko-chan is my nickname for ChatGPT.
I wanted to make it funnier. The idea was that if you laugh at someone else’s improvement, a boomerang may later land on your own head. That was the irony I wanted at the end of the post.
I rewrote the closing lines myself. I was aiming for the rhythm of a Japanese five-line verse—five, seven, five, seven, seven beats—and ended with tokudai būmeran: “extra-large boomerang.”
Extra-large. That ought to hurt if it landed on your head.
But an emphatic word does not necessarily fit the rhythm.
Count the Japanese beats: to-ku-da-i-bu-u-me-ra-n.
Nine. I wanted seven at the end. There were two too many.
That was where Kimiko-chan’s suggestion, deka būmeran, felt right. It means “big boomerang,” in a more casual voice.
De-ka-bu-u-me-ra-n.
Seven beats.
Replacing tokudai with deka kept the idea of something big while making the phrase two beats shorter. I told Kimiko-chan that her version fitted better.
The interesting part is that I had not simply handed the writing over to AI. Nor had the AI merely made a clean copy of my instructions.
I asked for more humor. I made changes myself. Then, when I considered how the phrase fitted, I preferred Kimiko-chan’s suggestion.
The words I choose do not have to be the words I wrote. But I still need to decide which ones belong.
What we had settled here was just the final phrase. Even so, two beats changed the feel of the ending.
From “extra-large” to “big.”
The phrase got smaller.
The blow to the head would probably hurt just as much.