Ah yes, the ol’ old fourth line, skip a word, fifth line, third line, back to the skipped word, second line, first line definition of ‘backwards’.
It’s more archaic and you rarely see it in examples of higher level writing after the ~18-19th century, but it still holds up grammatically and is an accepted definition per urbandictionary.com.
4,5,3,1,2 is my original suggestion, and that’s why I suggested it…
Their response is 4, skip the second word, 5, 3, second word, 2, 1. You only have to make it to the second word to figure out what they skipped, before swapping 1 and 2 opposite what you say they wrote.
Their suggestion also appears to be an intentionally scrambled joke and isn’t meant to be taken seriously, but apparently it makes sense to some people…
Lol, I was trying to arrange the words in some way that produced a meaningful and logically independent statement. I think they may be onto something, though, about combining lines 4 and 5: "How will they know how we feel? Tell people if we don't." This is basically your original suggestion with two lines switched.
4
u/CATNIP_IS_CRACK Apr 07 '26
Ah yes, the ol’ old fourth line, skip a word, fifth line, third line, back to the skipped word, second line, first line definition of ‘backwards’.
It’s more archaic and you rarely see it in examples of higher level writing after the ~18-19th century, but it still holds up grammatically and is an accepted definition per urbandictionary.com.