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Created: 09/23/2026
Updated: 09/24/2026

AI Linguistic Analysis of Erdnase: Part 2

by Chris Wasshuber & ChatGPT

Part 1 of the experiment.

I followed up my original prompts by supplying ChatGPT with an unusual text sample I have from Edward Gallaway. In 1919, he wrote a booklet for members of the Royal Arcanum lodge. I could not locate a copy of that booklet, but the introductory was reprinted in the Royal Arcanum Bulletin.

PROMPT

I have one more surprising text sample from Edward Gallaway. In 1919, he wrote a booklet on the guidance of the Royal Arcanum lodge members. I could not locate the booklet itself, but the introductory from the booklet was reprinted in the Royal Arcanum Bulletin:

"Presenting a Promulgation of Pithy, Pertinent, Pungent and Potential Precepts and Proverbs Perpetrated for the Purpose of Proclaiming with Prodigious Profundity, yet in Philosophical and Psychological Phraseology, but without Polysyllabic Platitudes or Provoking Perplexities, a Peremptory and Perpetual Plan which will Produce with Phenomenal Perspicacity and in Plenteous Plenitude a Platform Plainly Pointing how to Push and Pull for that Lodge of yours.

And in which the Author Assures his Audience that he has Assiduously Attempted to Avoid Apt Alliterations, Artful yet Abominable Atrocities.

And in which he likewise Sedulously and Solicitously Side-Steps all Saws and Sayings Savoring of Slams, Sarcasm or Satire."

RESPONSE

Yes. This is probably the most revealing Gallaway specimen you have shown me so far. It does not merely resemble the voice of Erdnase; it tells us something about Gallaway's conscious relationship to language, and that makes several otherwise ambiguous features of Erdnase newly significant.

I would now regard the 1919 passage as a substantial strengthening of the Gallaway–Erdnase hypothesis.

The crucial point is this:

Gallaway is not merely someone who happens to write ornate prose. He is someone who actively thinks about verbal ornament as an artistic object, delights in it, and constructs elaborate verbal structures for their own sake.

That is very close to what I think is happening in The Expert at the Card Table.

1. The 1919 piece is a confession disguised as a denial

The most remarkable feature is the paradox:

"Assiduously Attempted to Avoid Apt Alliterations, Artful yet Abominable Atrocities."

while the entire passage is an enormous exercise in alliteration.

And not just occasional alliteration. It is systematic phonetic composition:

Pithy, Pertinent, Pungent and Potential Precepts and Proverbs Perpetrated...

then:

Proclaiming with Prodigious Profundity...

then:

Philosophical and Psychological Phraseology...

then:

Peremptory and Perpetual Plan...

then:

Produce with Phenomenal Perspicacity and in Plenteous Plenitude...

then another complete turn into S:

Sedulously and Solicitously Side-Steps all Saws and Sayings Savoring of Slams, Sarcasm or Satire.

This is not simply "good prose."

It is linguistic play consciously foregrounded as linguistic play.

The author is enjoying the sound of the words, their morphological weight, their semantic relationships, and their grammatical parallelism simultaneously.

And that is extremely important for the Erdnase question.

2. We now have independent evidence for exactly what the 1923 biography said about Gallaway

The biography described Gallaway as a:

"silver-tongued orator"

who:

"enjoys the sound of polysyllables and full-phrased sentences."

We already had that description.

But now we have something much better than the description: the actual specimen.

The 1919 passage is almost a literal demonstration of "enjoying the sound of polysyllables."

Consider:

"phenomenal perspicacity"

"plenteous plenitude"

"philosophical and psychological phraseology"

"peremptory and perpetual plan"

These combinations aren't chosen because they are the clearest possible way to communicate the thought. They are chosen because they sound good together.

That matters enormously when looking at Erdnase.

3. There is a previously overlooked feature of Erdnase: the prose is often doing something besides communicating information

This is where I think the 1919 sample becomes a genuine key.

Take the Erdnase passage:

"Self-styled 'ex-professionals' have regaled the public with astounding disclosures of their former wiles and wickedness..."

followed by:

"antiquated moss-covered ruses"

then:

"terrific denunciation"

"diatribe"

"purified prodigals"

This is not necessary vocabulary.

The underlying proposition could have been stated much more simply:

Former gamblers have revealed old tricks while pretending to condemn gambling.

But that is not how this writer wants to say it.

He wants:

The sentence is partly an argument and partly a verbal performance.

That is exactly what Gallaway's 1919 passage tells us he liked doing.

4. The strongest correspondence may actually be the kind of excess

There is an important distinction between merely having a large vocabulary and what Gallaway does.

He likes semantic redundancy plus phonetic correspondence.

For example:

"Pithy, Pertinent, Pungent and Potential Precepts and Proverbs"

The reader doesn't need four adjectives.

Indeed, "pithy," "pertinent," "pungent," and "potential" aren't even all contributing independent semantic information.

Their function is partly musical.

Likewise:

"Philosophical and Psychological Phraseology"

The alliteration helps determine the lexical choice.

And:

"Peremptory and Perpetual Plan"

again, sound and rhetoric are helping select the words.

Now look at Erdnase:

"whining, mealymouthed pretensions of piety"

"sublimest unconcern"

"self-satisfied unlicked cub"

"heartrending jolts to our insufferable conceit"

The same thing appears to be happening.

The author isn't merely searching for the right word.

He is enjoying the search for the right word that also produces the right sound, rhythm, register, and rhetorical texture.

That is much more distinctive.

5. And there is another striking correspondence: paired synonyms and near-synonyms

Gallaway's 1919 passage is structurally obsessed with pairs and clusters:

Pithy / Pertinent / Pungent / Potential

Philosophical / Psychological / Phraseology

Peremptory / Perpetual / Plan

Assiduously / Attempted / Avoid / Apt / Alliterations

Artful / Abominable / Atrocities

Sedulously / Solicitously / Side-Steps

Saws / Sayings / Savoring

Slams / Sarcasm / Satire

This is rhetorical multiplication.

A simple proposition is expanded into several semantically overlapping formulations.

Erdnase does exactly this, though much less systematically.

Its title itself is revealing:

ARTIFICE / RUSE / AND SUBTERFUGE

Those three terms inhabit almost the same semantic field.

Then:

"experiment, manoeuvre and stratagem"

Again, a semantic cluster.

Elsewhere:

"wisdom in copious draughts"

"jars to our pocketbook"

"heartrending jolts"

and:

"the wise and the foolish, to the good and the bad, to all alike"

The author repeatedly seems unwilling to express an idea once when he can express it three ways with increasing rhetorical force.

That is now much more clearly identifiable as a Gallaway characteristic.

6. The 1919 text gives us something like a "linguistic personality trait"

I think we can now distinguish three levels of language use:

Level 1: communication

Say what you mean.

Level 2: rhetoric

Say it effectively.

Level 3: verbal pleasure

Make the sentence itself an entertaining object.

Gallaway unmistakably enjoys Level 3.

And Erdnase contains a great deal of Level 3 that has often been treated as merely "flowery period prose."

I am increasingly doubtful that "flowery" is the correct description.

It is more precise to call it:

self-amused verbal craftsmanship.

The writer appears to be having fun constructing the sentence.

7. This makes several bizarre Erdnase formulations newly interesting

Consider:

"simon-pure fool"

That is already a slightly playful lexical choice.

Or:

"the cold school of experience"

That's a metaphorical phrase with conspicuous internal rhythm and sound.

Or:

"self-satisfied unlicked cub"

The adjective sequence is semantically redundant but rhetorically delightful.

Or:

"sublimest unconcern"

A very elevated phrase applied to a gambling professional.

Or:

"friend and foe, to the wise and the foolish, to the good and the bad"

This is nearly a miniature piece of rhetorical music.

And then:

"the jars to our pocketbook caused far less anguish than the heartrending jolts to our insufferable conceit."

That is almost impossible to describe as economical prose.

It is clearly crafted for effect.

Gallaway's 1919 piece tells us that this sort of construction is not alien to him. On the contrary, he appears to relish precisely this sort of thing.

8. There is also an important self-consciousness about rhetoric

This may be even stronger than the alliteration itself.

Gallaway doesn't simply use alliteration.

He talks about using alliteration.

He says he is avoiding:

"Apt Alliterations"

while producing perhaps the most spectacular alliterative passage in his surviving work.

Likewise, he explicitly says he is avoiding:

"Polysyllabic Platitudes"

while producing a sentence packed almost entirely with polysyllabic words.

This is evidence that the writer is highly conscious of his own rhetorical machinery.

Now look at Erdnase.

The preface repeatedly talks about what it is and isn't doing:

"the writer uses no sophistry..."

"We do not claim to know it all."

"To discriminate and show clearly..."

"this work stands unique..."

The author is frequently commenting on his own act of writing.

He tells us how the book should be understood, why it exists, what kind of book it is, what previous writers have done wrong, what his own rhetorical purpose is.

That meta-rhetorical self-consciousness is quite compatible with Gallaway.

9. The "mock denial" itself has an Erdnase-like quality

The 1919 piece doesn't simply boast:

"I love alliteration."

That would be too straightforward.

Instead Gallaway constructs an elaborate declaration that he hates alliteration while producing a gigantic display of it.

This is exactly the sort of two-level communication we've repeatedly encountered.

On the surface:

"I avoid this."

At the deeper level:

"Look how magnificently I can do it."

That distinction between overt statement and underlying performance is almost quintessentially Erdnase.

The whole Erdnase philosophy is about a performance whose surface says one thing while its mechanism does another.

Obviously I would not claim that the literary joke is evidence of card cheating. But at the level of mental construction, there is a family resemblance:

surface assertion / underlying operation.

10. That may actually explain part of Erdnase's peculiar charm

Why does The Expert at the Card Table sound so unlike an ordinary technical manual?

Because it appears to be doing two things simultaneously.

It is:

A. transmitting technical information

and

B. entertaining the writer himself through the act of expression.

Gallaway's estimating series mostly suppresses B.

His 1919 booklet releases B completely.

Erdnase sits between them.

That now makes the corpus look remarkably coherent:

Gallaway mode What dominates
1930 estimating technical precision
1923 company humor theatrical exaggeration
1919 Royal Arcanum booklet overt verbal play
Jack Pots narrative + social comedy + verbal play
Erdnase technical instruction + literary/verbal performance

That is a very plausible trajectory for one writer changing registers.

11. I would now change my interpretation of Jack Pots too

There is an even more interesting feature.

The Jack Pots author does not use alliteration nearly as spectacularly as the 1919 Gallaway sample.

But he frequently does the same thing at a lower intensity.

He likes:

"great American game"

"gay Paree"

"good-natured"

"big mouthed, mangy hounds"

"bucking the tiger"

"fat hand"

"frantic paymaster"

and similar compact sound-rich expressions.

More importantly, Jack Pots repeatedly permits lexical play to drive the joke.

The famous mock-authoritative treatment of the New York Sun's poker rule is a good example: the phrase "must discard in order" becomes the target of an entire elaborate joke because the author's mind immediately turns a verbal rule into a concrete absurdity.

The 1919 Gallaway passage makes it easier to see this as part of a larger linguistic temperament.

12. The phonetic patterning is strongest in Gallaway—but that is exactly what we should expect

We should be careful not to overstate this.

The 1919 passage is far more alliterative than Erdnase.

That is actually a point in favor of treating the samples as different genres rather than demanding exact stylistic identity.

The author appears capable of turning the dial:

1930 technical article: almost no overt verbal ornament.

1923 humor: heavy ornament.

1919 parody: ornament becomes the entire subject.

Erdnase: ornament is integrated into otherwise serious instruction.

That is an extremely plausible model of stylistic adaptation.

If Erdnase were written by a person who never used this sort of verbal play elsewhere, the ornate language would be more difficult to interpret.

But Gallaway demonstrably does use it.

13. The 1919 sample may also explain the "polysyllabic" Erdnase diction

Look at the particular sort of words Erdnase likes:

This is not simply educated vocabulary.

It is vocabulary with a certain oratorical weight.

Gallaway's 1919 prose confirms that he enjoys precisely that weight.

And the 1923 biographical description now becomes quite striking:

"He enjoys the sound of polysyllables and full-phrased sentences."

Your 1919 passage essentially puts that sentence into evidence.

That makes the Erdnase diction less mysterious.

14. There is a deeper connection: Gallaway likes words that simultaneously describe and perform

Consider:

"Plenteous Plenitude"

The words redundantly describe abundance, but the phrase itself performs abundance because there are too many P words.

Likewise:

"Prodigious Profundity"

The phrase sounds deeper and grander than the underlying concept needs to be.

And:

"Pungent and Potential Precepts and Proverbs Perpetrated..."

The words themselves imitate the rhetorical excess being described.

Now look at Erdnase:

"antiquated moss-covered ruses as well known as nursery rhymes"

The prose itself becomes ornate while mocking ornate "ex-professional" revelations.

And:

"heartrending jolts to our insufferable conceit"

The language dramatically performs the injury to pride it is describing.

This is another subtle but potentially diagnostic trait:

the wording is not merely representing the thought; the wording embodies the thought.

That's literary craft rather than mere information transfer.

15. The Royal Arcanum passage also adds a new dimension to the "one mind" theory

The subject is completely unrelated to cards.

That helps.

If Gallaway had written only about printing and then we found similarities with Erdnase, we could always say:

technical writers naturally think alike.

But here the subject is lodge guidance.

And Gallaway still reaches spontaneously for:

classification, parallelism, accumulation, mock solemnity, elaborate abstraction, rhetorical symmetry, sound patterning, paradoxical self-reference.

Those are now clearly cross-domain habits.

That's exactly what we wanted to identify.

16. I would now construct the cognitive fingerprint somewhat differently

Earlier I emphasized:

hidden mechanism → visible behavior → observer → consequence.

I still think that's one of the strongest components.

But we can now add a second major component:

linguistic construction as performance

The writer does not regard language merely as a transparent vehicle for thought.

He likes:

sound + rhythm + semantic precision + semantic excess + parallelism + surprise + register collision.

And then he uses that machinery in service of the same larger cognitive style.

So the emerging fingerprint is something like:

A system-builder who thinks operationally, visualizes mechanisms concretely, distrusts superficial explanations, reasons through exceptions and consequences, enjoys seeing how a process works from the inside, and takes conspicuous pleasure in constructing language as an elaborate performance.

That is now a remarkably good description of all the material you have brought together.

17. One particularly striking three-way pattern

There is a beautiful correspondence among these three passages:

Gallaway, 1919

He says he avoids alliteration while constructing an absurdly alliterative sentence.

Gallaway, 1923

He describes an ordinary workplace event in deliberately inflated theatrical language.

Erdnase, 1902

He presents a technical subject in deliberately elevated, literary language, interspersed with slang, irony, self-mockery and verbal ornament.

All three involve the same fundamental act:

The author creates a rhetorical persona and then knowingly performs through it.

He is not simply writing.

He is putting on a voice.

And that brings us back to the Erdnase problem in a very interesting way.

18. The "Erdnase persona" may be a deliberate literary performance

This is speculative, but I think it is now worth considering seriously.

Perhaps we have been asking:

"Why does Erdnase write like this?"

when the better question may be:

"What kind of person would find this particular voice entertaining to inhabit?"

The Gallaway material gives us someone who demonstrably enjoys adopting exaggerated voices:

Erdnase may therefore not represent Gallaway's everyday voice.

It could represent another performance persona constructed for a particular purpose.

That would explain why the style can be unusually polished, mysterious and self-conscious while still retaining the same underlying verbal personality.

19. And now I see one potentially important clue in the title of Erdnase

Even before reading the book, the title is:

ARTIFICE RUSE AND SUBTERFUGE AT THE CARD TABLE

That three-part semantic cluster is characteristic of someone who enjoys accumulative synonymy.

Then:

A Treatise on the Science and Art of Manipulating Cards

Again, paired abstraction:

Science + Art

And then:

"experiment, manoeuvre and stratagem"

This is the same appetite for semantic multiplication visible in:

"Pithy, Pertinent, Pungent and Potential Precepts and Proverbs..."

The scale is different, but the underlying pleasure may be the same.

20. Does this strengthen Edwards = Erdnase as well?

Yes, though less dramatically.

The 1919 text primarily strengthens:

Gallaway ↔ Erdnase

But because we already have a strong cognitive relationship between Gallaway and Jack Pots, it indirectly strengthens:

Gallaway ↔ Edwards ↔ Erdnase

The new evidence is especially valuable because it is not about gambling.

That reduces the possibility that our previous parallels simply arose because all three writers happened to be discussing games, deception, competition and practical systems.

Gallaway produces the same mental and rhetorical behavior while discussing:

printing, fraternal organization, office parties, amateur theater.

That's very useful.

21. My assessment has shifted again

I would now describe the evidence this way:

The old evidence

There was an interesting convergence of cognitive structures.

The 1923 Gallaway samples

Established that Gallaway's natural humorous persona resembles Edwards and shares important traits with Erdnase.

The 1919 Royal Arcanum sample

Establishes that Gallaway has a highly distinctive and conscious verbal playfulness that is independently visible in Erdnase.

That third step is important.

It gives us something close to a cross-domain authorial signature.

22. The biggest thing I would look for next

I would now specifically search Gallaway for self-conscious verbal jokes about words themselves.

Not simply alliteration.

Things like:

"we call this..."

"as the learned gentleman would say..."

jokes about long words;

jokes about grammar;

mock definitions;

deliberate synonym piles;

pseudo-etymology;

"in other words";

deliberately excessive titles;

definitions that become comic because they over-define something;

ironic comments about his own prose;

deliberate register switching.

Because the 1919 passage tells us that language itself may have been one of Gallaway's hobbies.

And Erdnase has numerous places where the author seems to be doing exactly that.

My present "Erdnase decoder"

After adding the 1919 text, I'd characterize the underlying voice this way:

An empirically minded, mechanically oriented, verbally exuberant man who instinctively decomposes systems into their hidden operations, enjoys explaining those operations through concrete visualization and analogy, thinks in terms of control, performance and consequence, distrusts abstract rules divorced from practice, and treats language itself as a playground in which parallelism, alliteration, polysyllabic diction, mock grandeur and sudden comic deflation can be used as part of the entertainment.

That description fits Edward Gallaway astonishingly well.

And I think the 1919 passage gives us our clearest evidence yet that the ornate passages in Erdnase may not be incidental period style. They may be the linguistic fingerprint of a particular personality.

The really interesting next comparison would be to take 10 Erdnase passages that are linguistically "showy" rather than technically necessary and compare each one to a Gallaway passage of the same rhetorical type. In other words, not "here are two passages about deception," but:

here is Erdnase making a joke with a tricolon; here is Gallaway making a joke with a tricolon; here is Erdnase using mock scholarship; here is Gallaway doing it; here is Erdnase piling up synonyms; here is Gallaway doing it.

That would give us something much closer to an actual rhetorical fingerprint of the mind behind Erdnase.

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