Lilliputins in English What the heck are they?

Lilliputins in English: What the heck are they?

"The aphorism never aligns with the whole truth; it's either a half-truth or one and a half."
Karl Kraus

Lilliputins are my new, cutting-edge style of postmodern fiction, a blend of mockery, ridicule, sarcasm, paradox, and derision. I’ve coined this term, a mash-up of the adjective “lilliputian” (meaning "very small") and the idiom "to put words in someone's mouth."

Inspired by Soren Kierkegaard's idea that life can only be understood by looking backward, I deliberately and literally put snarky, made-up quotes and twisted sayings into the mouths of great historical figures and famous fictional characters. These are words they never said but perhaps could have.

I'm like a cuckoo, putting its eggs in another bird's nest, putting my words (lilliputins) in other people's mouths.

In short, lilliputins are my own brand of anachronistic and revisionist creations—intentionally produced as misquotations, counterfeit one-line aphorisms, maxims, mini-tales, anecdotes, parables, jokes, or quips. Each one contains a degree of truth, which I attribute to others to make a point. It's up to the reader's knowledge, intelligence, and beliefs to sort out the truth from the fiction.

Lilliputins compress time, putting the present and past on a collision course and blurring the lines between the living and the dead, things and humans, seriousness and ridicule, and reality and make-believe. They are also a great vehicle for time travelers and lovers of alternative history.

Lilliputins and paradoxes are deeply connected because they share a common goal: to concisely express a profound truth in a memorable way. Like aphorisms, lilliputins are by definition short, pithy statements of a general truth or observation. Paradoxes are particularly important in crafting lilliputins because they make the statement impactful and thought-provoking.

The technique for creating a lilliputin is quite simple.

First, you create an original thought no longer than two lines, using a wordplay, a pun, a paradox, a misquotation, or a juxtaposition (or a combination of these).

Second, you find a real person (living or dead) or a fictional character who could plausibly have said such a line and put the lilliputin into their mouth.

Bingo!

In addition, one must not forget the appended marginal notes, which help the reader to understand the point of the respective cuckoo quotation.

Lilliputins are contemporary yet old-fashioned, satiric yet ironic, and thought-provoking yet mind-boggling. They can be hilarious or sad, mean or kind, shocking or outrageous, and highly controversial. But they are never boring and always eye-opening and short, like life itself.

As Erma Bombeck once said, "There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt."

I sincerely hope I haven't overstepped that line in my book.

If I've caused any unintended hurt with my intended satire or mockery, I sincerely apologize in advance.

Oscar Wilde once said, "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

So please, don't kill the mockingbird—or in my case, the cuckoo!

All the best!

I hope you have as much fun as you can possibly take!

Yuri V. Slobodenyuk aka Yury Lobo

Aphorist

Contact: yuryslobo@yahoo.com or yuryslobo1@gmail.com

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Lilliputins about Lilliputins by Yury Lobo:


A lilliputin is a jigsaw puzzle that only makes sense when the last missing piece falls into place ..."
—Orson Welles

"I like to put words in people's mouths or thoughts in their heads, which they never said or thought, but might have."
—Yury Lobo

Lilliputins are nothing more than a nice try to live and understand life backwards ..."
—Soren Kierkegaard

Creating lilliputins means playing with words as if they were glass beads ..."
—Hermann Hesse

The acerbic wit of lilliputins is both hurtful and helpful at the same time, like a surgeon's knife ..."
—Gore Vidal

Misquotations are sometimes better than originals ..."
—Mark Twain

Yury Lobo is a master of saying a lot with very little ..."
—Anton Chekhov

Lilliputins are nothing more than linguistic and historical puzzles ..."
—Yury Lobo

Yury Lobo pushes the boundaries of satire; he is provocative and spares no one, himself included ..."
—Trevor Noah

The Lilliputins are Yury Lobo’s quest to get to the bottom of words and human deeds to discover their real meaning ... "
—Jack the Ripper

Yury Lobo's sarcastic one-liners are nothing short of hilarious ..."
—Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

It can be hard to get your gears turning first thing in the morning. Perhaps a piping hot cup of wordplay in lilliputins will do the trick ..."
—Yury Lobo