CDXLVII

Introduction
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A picture of four flowers in a row.

Adumpe olí šora palwingo.

Adumpe olí šora palwingo.

"All flowers are the same height."

While strolling through the palace gardens one afternoon, Rage Nasko noticed that the flower beds were so perfectly attended to that all the flowers growing therein were the same height. This was on account of the careful breeding and timely planting of the royal gardener. Not knowing this, Nasko attributed the happy coincidence to divine providence. As such, he called on his attendants and scribes, that they might here his royal proclamation: Adumpe olí šora palwingo. His attendants and scribes were a bit confused by this, but they recorded his izanyoža faithfully, nevertheless.

Later that day, on a trip through the city, Nasko wandered by a flowerbox in the window of the home of a private citizen. Two of the flowers, he was happy to learn, were the same height as the flowers in the palace gardens. The other three, however, were slightly shorter. Further, their heights were not uniform. Indeed, the first was slightly larger than the second, which itself was slightly larger than the third. For fear of offending the natural order of things, as he understood them, and upset at being contradicted by three flowers, Nasko flew into a rage, ripped out the three recalcitrant blooms, and ordered that the owner of the flowerbox be executed at dawn. His attendants later convinced the Rage to reduce the sentence to three months of hard labor, but in order to ensure such a thing never happened again, his attendants took it upon themselves to ensure the uniformity of the heights of the flowers throughout Ansenlas.

After awhile, the citizenry got so used to the height of flowers that they began to use the flower as a unit of measurement. The average resident of Ansenlas, for example, was a little over two olí tall. A house generally had a ceiling that stood four olí off the floor. Further, textile merchants that sold cloth and linen to tailors and various private citizens began to use the oli as their sole unit of measurement, on account of its nebulous definition. A customer would ask for three olí of silk, and the merchant would then give them as little as they could possibly get away with. More often than not, the customer would become angry, and accuse the merchant of trying to cheat them. The merchant would reply simply, Adumpe olí šora palwingo, and then go off to a nearby garden to pick a flower that would fit the measurment that had just been made.


Vocabulary List

  • adumpe (v.) to be the same (as) (for "with respect to x", the instrumental is used)
  • oli (n.) flower (note: plural is olí)
  • šora (adj.) all (of)
  • pwingo (n.) height (note: instrumental form is palwingo)

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