I decided to use Thesaurus.com to generate synonyms for words, and see how far from the initial word definition that multiple iterations would take me, essentially destroying the original meaning. I had a constraint, similar to the Google Image recursion video we saw in class. If I saw a word once, I would not go back to it, and would instead pick the next best synonym. I started with the arbitrary word “bright”, and generated synonyms for it, and so on for 40 iterations. Here is a selection of the iterations:

Fifth iteration: “flaming”

Tenth iteration: “bloom”

Twentieth iteration: “smirk”

Thirtieth iteration: “bomb”

Fortieth iteration: “bombing run”

As can be seen, by the tenth iteration, the meaning was already distorted, and it continued on from there. Here’s a link to a PowerPoint showing each iteration, if anyone wants to see the specifics!