Yes, but I TYPE like Jack Kerouac.

I read an Associated Press article by Jake Coyle on the Washington Post's website about the popularity of a site called I Write Like which allows people to paste in a few paragraphs of text, compare it to a database of works by about 50 authors, and then tell them which author's style the software thinks they resemble.

Coyle writes that when others tried it out, I Write Like thought one of Mel Gibson's obscenity-laced phone tirades directed at his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva positively Margaret Atwoodian, while Margaret's writings turned out to be Steven Kingian, a distinction shared by Herman Melville.

I uploaded a few examples of my own (that's not) writing (that's typing) and got a different result every time. I write like Stephen King; I write like Charles Dickens; I write like James Joyce; I write like Kurt Vonnegut. It's good company, even if I turn out not to write anything like my homegirl Peggy Atwood. I'm relieved that none of my writing samples came back - as other people's have - with the alarming words, "You write like Dan Brown."

It could have been worse: "You write like the guy in your legal department who drafted the boilerplate Master Software Development Agreement With Intellectual Property Rights."

Something for @Bartlett'sFamiliarQuotations.

Recently, I happened to refer to my followers on Twitter as "tweeple," which, for those of you who don't know, is what one calls Twitter people.

It turns out that my wife, the Lovely Mrs. byoolin's trebuchet, is one of those who didn't know that, and asked me, "Did you just make that up?"

"No," I said. "That word is as old as Twitter itself."