Unstable Grammar

Unstable Syntax · grammar that mutates under your feet

Speed Punct Fade Chaos

mutations: 0000

The child walks into the garden. She carries a candle. The air is trembling. A rule promises order; the sentence believes it. I place a comma, and the pause obeys. But rules drift. Nouns remember motion. Verbs grow nouns. Articles slip away. Reading becomes a step into sand that will not hold.

Tip: hover a word to stabilize it briefly; click any word to trigger a local collapse. Paste your own text above and press Reset, then Start.

About Unstable Syntax

What you’re seeing. A poem where grammar refuses to stay put. Each word has a guessed part-of-speech. Over time, nouns tend to verbalize, verbs congeal into nouns, articles dissolve, and punctuation thins. A gentle “compiler glitch” occasionally inserts stray brackets, slashes, or braces—visible artifacts of a language machine misfiring.

How to read / perform it. Let it mutate on its own, or intervene:

• Hover a word to momentarily stabilize it (it outlines).
• Click any word to trigger a small “collapse” that ripples to neighbors.
• Reset remounts the text (use after pasting your own), then press Start.

Controls. Speed changes tick rate. Punct Fade increases the chance that light punctuation disappears. Chaos increases rare vowel-drop and the likelihood of visible “compile” glitches.

What it’s “about.” It stages a tug-of-war between rule and use. Prescriptive marks (articles, punctuation, tidy inflections) keep promising order, while the text insists on becoming something else—stuttering, reclassifying itself, and shedding scaffolding. Meaning emerges as a moving target rather than a fixed sentence.

Accessibility & play. The poem is keyboard friendly: focus the stage and press Enter to burst-mutate a region. Screen readers will hear updates as the text shifts (aria-live polite). For calmer reading, lower Speed and Chaos.

Pro tip: paste a legal brief, a product description, or yesterday’s notes into the box and watch how quickly tone and category slip their leashes.