An ode to MySQL Stopwords

If you don’t know, you probably don’t care, but in any case: stopwords are words you CAN’T search for in a full-text search of the database. They’re filtered out for performance/space reasons, because they’re ‘noisy’.  You know, words like “the” or “and” – things you wouldn’t search for anyway. Or “novel”? “welcome”!?! Anyway, it’s annoyed me so many times that I wrote the following poem composed entirely of them:

Thanx, whoever they may be
For specifying many useful ones
Amongst the others ignored

C’mon, it just isn’t sensible
Consequently I wonder why
But regardless
Somebody somewhere should be sorry

  1. Andy Turner’s avatar

    Nice, it is a silly, but also a beautiful language English, the consequential language of un-noisy words that is largely a subset of English, but with other strings and obscure symbols is just as beautiful, but less controlled by Dick and Harry. The beauty is wabi sabi and natural. It is poetic too. I read this post to Kate Turner who laughed but couldn’t think of a witty enough reply at the time. She knows of the existence of this comment, but not what it contains. I wonder if she will join in the conversation. Likewise Sebastian that I met on the train… Sebastian, a future ghost writer studying English and Philosophy at Edinburgh university who hopefully negotiated Simone carefully even if he wasn’t good. I suppose anyone that has read this far will be wanting the TiddlersTales_episode_g_a_strange_loop_version_0.1.doc which only exists off-line for the time being. Mr C, I’ll post it to you also with a request to join us today for some fun in the sun…

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