I'm getting married in March. Since neither me nor my partner are religious, we're writing our own ceremony from scratch. I thought I'd use this project to generate a wedding ceremony.

In 1595, Edmund Spenser wrote the Epithalamion in honor of his second marriage. The poem claims to work as a kind of talisman, ensuring a good marriage will follow. I'm not a poet, and I can't claim to exert any kind of magical power with the force of my words or my code. What I can do is nod at the infinite variety of relationships, generate a few nonsensical jokes, and prepare to make an eternal vow.

Infinite Epithalamium, my NaNoGenMo project, uses noun-replacement and Markov chains to generate wedding ceremonies for random lists of nouns. I start with the ceremony of matrimony in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, one of the earlier examples of the ceremony still used today (it is one of the origin points for phrases like "to have and to hold," etc.). I then pull a random corpus out of Darius Kazemi's useful and delightful Corpora project (I use Allison Parrish's pycorpora in my script). I use TextBlob to detect the nouns in the Book of Common Prayer, and replace them with random nouns from whatever random corpus I've pulled.

I could have stopped there, but I found that just replacing nouns didn't quite capture the absurdity I wanted. So after I replace nouns, I use this implementation of Markov chains to generate 20 random sentences from the modified ceremony text. I did this 100 times, and wound up with a text of 58,339 words. The output is a kind of wild jumble of the variety of Corpora and the repeated standard marriage ceremony language. I didn't put any limitations on my random selection of a corpus, allowing them to freely repeat. I would have made it cleaner with more time, but I'm happy with the output for now (and I may return to the project after the deadline, perhaps turning the output into a pdf).

I realize this is a weird way for me to express my joy about getting married (and of course, none of these new texts can become our actual ceremony), but I'm pleased with the way this turned out. I can't always find the words to express how I feel about this person I've chosen to spend my life with, so it's comforting to know there are infinite combinations of words out there.

You can find the output from my script (ceremony.py) in ceremony.md and on this page.