To be clear I unendorsed the idea about a minute after posting because it felt like more of a low-effort shitpost than a constructive idea for understanding the world (and I don’t want to make that a norm on shortform). That said I had in mind that you’re describing the thing to someone who you can’t communicate with beforehand, except there’s common knowledge that you’re forbidden any nouns besides “cake”. In practice I feel like it degenerates to putting all the meaning on adjectives to construct the nouns you’d want to use. E.g. your own “speaking cake” to denote a person, “flat, vertical, compartmentalizing cakes” to denote walls. Of course you’d have to ban any “-like” and “-esque” constructions and similar things, but it’s not clear to me if the boundaries there are too fuzzy to make a good rule set.
Actually, maybe this could be a board game similar to charades. You get a random word such as “elephant”, and you write down a description of it with this constraint. Then the description is gradually read off, and your team tries to guess the word based on the description. It’s inverse to charades in that the reading is monotonous and w/o body language (and could even be done by the other team).
To be clear I unendorsed the idea about a minute after posting because it felt like more of a low-effort shitpost than a constructive idea for understanding the world (and I don’t want to make that a norm on shortform). That said I had in mind that you’re describing the thing to someone who you can’t communicate with beforehand, except there’s common knowledge that you’re forbidden any nouns besides “cake”. In practice I feel like it degenerates to putting all the meaning on adjectives to construct the nouns you’d want to use. E.g. your own “speaking cake” to denote a person, “flat, vertical, compartmentalizing cakes” to denote walls. Of course you’d have to ban any “-like” and “-esque” constructions and similar things, but it’s not clear to me if the boundaries there are too fuzzy to make a good rule set.
Actually, maybe this could be a board game similar to charades. You get a random word such as “elephant”, and you write down a description of it with this constraint. Then the description is gradually read off, and your team tries to guess the word based on the description. It’s inverse to charades in that the reading is monotonous and w/o body language (and could even be done by the other team).