Ogden and Richards refer to Ingraham as an "able but little known writer", and quote his following dialogue: "Suppose someone to assert: The gostak distims the doshes.
"This can be seen in the following dialogue: In this case, it is possible to describe the grammatical and syntactical relationships between the terms in the sentence — that gostak is a noun subject, distimming is a transitive verb, and doshes is a plural direct object — even though there is no fact of the matter about what a gostak or distimming or doshes actually are.
The phrase appears in a number of subsequent cultural contexts including: Miles Breuer wrote a story, published in Amazing Stories for March 1930[3] and now considered a classic, titled "The Gostak and the Doshes"[4] whose protagonist travels to an alternate Earth in which the phrase is a political slogan, one that induces sufficient umbrage throughout the populace to declare justified, righteous war.
[example needed] The phrase is the namesake of an interactive fiction game called The Gostak, written by Carl Muckenhoupt.
Most of the text of the game is in an entirely unknown language (fundamentally English in syntax and grammar, but with much of the vocabulary and even idiomatic constructions changed) which the player must decipher, not only to understand the game's text but also to type commands in the same language.