The other day I was trying to impress upon a class of writers how cool it is that every sentence in English can be boiled down to one of four sentence patterns. They were having trouble grasping the second pattern, whose main elements are a subject, a transitive verb, and a direct object. That object thing was giving them heartburn.

I remembered a game—The Exquisite Corpse—the Surrealists used to play. In a twist of the parlor game Consequences—and its visual analogue, Picture Consequences—they would string random words together in a certain pattern. The resulting sentence sometimes flirted with rationality, but worked structurally. The name of the game allegedly derives from the phrase the Surrealists created when they first played the game, Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau. (“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”)

Here’s how Wikipedia defines the game: “Exquisite corpse is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled, the result being known as the exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun“) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.”

OK, I’ll grant you that we didn’t exactly turn 109 Sever Hall at Harvard University into 54 rue du Chateau in Paris. But following the rule Subject/Transitive Verb/Direct Object we gave the Exquisite Corpse a good try, coming up with:

• The coffee beans sautéed the rooster.
• Vampires borrow snow.
• The conductor kicked the can.

Changing the rule to Subject/Static Verb/Complement, we got:

• The Easter Bunny is upset.
• Santa Claus was a worrywart.

Good enough for Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and André Breton? I’d say so.

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1. Seven Deadly Sins