Sometimes insight comes from messing around with the order of things.
Sometimes inspiration requires rote mechanics.
Sometimes it helps to set up a structure and follow it until ideas start popping.
That’s how nunovo came about.
It’s a concatenation of 3-letter words derived from pwp, which was the mandatory extension assigned by Telewest/Blueyonder to the webspace they provided as part of my cable/internet service.
The words were identified by making a list in reverse alphabetical order, as follows:
pwp
ovo
nun
mtm
lsl
… and then re-arranging the order.
It was lucky that nun+ovo had vowels in the right places and formed a word in its own right, something in Italian, something else in some of the Slavic languages.
But that’s not how Canvas Steam Train came about.
CST is mainly a product of my mind’s eye, but one that has myriad possibilities in anagrammatic form.
Such as:
Amnesiacs Tart Van
Caravan As Mittens
Caveman Sitar Ants
Savants Ramie Cant
Vast Arcane Mantis
each of which might prompt a thought, a topic, a post. Which means there’ll be more on this at some point.
Canvas Steam Train is meant to evoke a peculiar contrast, and it started out as something more like Rusty Pup Tent, which I had hopes of confusing further by adding an active term like Philosophy, Knowledge or Life to it, e.g. Knowledge from a Rusty Pup Tent. But the anagrammatics would have been cumbersome to derive. I considered Canvas Locomotive for a minute, but opted for Canvas Steam Train instead.
It will probably change.