Writer's Notebook

Vanity had always been a proud noun. She spent most of his life showing her very many advantages to any and everyone who might happen to be in the neighbourhood. Her room, need we say, was dominated by one of the largest vanity tables ever seen, on top of which was an emerald encrusted box containing whatever vanity might require to keep up her reputation. Without a doubt vanity was one of the proudest persons alive.

But it's hard work keeping up reputations. So when Vanity heard of the word incubator, she jumped at the chance. It's principle was really quite simple. All you had to do, was engrave a word on a silver plaque using a special liner to be found in most cosmetic stores, place the plaque inside the incubator and wait ten minutes. During this time, the engraved word would spawn a number of similar expressions. Her friend "free" had actually come up with so many that Vanity was determined to beat her hollow and restore the natural order of things.

As was her habit, Vanity took a long time engraving her name in an artistic style few others could copy. Unfortunately, she placed the plaque upside down inside the incubator leading to the nightmare that followed. The machine went into reverse incubate mode and started spewing out words like hollow, worthless, trivial, pointless, empty. Vanity was horrified. She pushed every button she could but this only made things worse. The incubator went into overdrive and started to print out word after word, not stopping until some two days later it had produced one enormous manuscript.

Vanity was so ashamed it raced upstairs into the bathroom and hid the manuscript in the cabinet below the sink which she had had built in order to hide the pipes from view. It was here, long after Vanity's self-imposed exile from civilisation that a visiting literature professor found the manuscript and realising its undoubted qualities published it under the title Vanity Fair.