lipograms

While in the United States, folk have been most generous in responding to my requests for recommended reading in American literature. I have been reading some terrific books, especially Faulkner, whom I had not encountered before, and some more generalist books as well. One that somebody has loaned me is ‘Adventures of a Verbivore’, by Richard Lederer (1994 Pocket Books, New York), an American linguist who is apparently quite well known here. Something that I encountered regarding lipograms in this book might interest folk. Lipograms are passages that deliberately omit one or more letters of the alphabet. Here is what he has to say: ‘The most extensive lipogram in English is the 1939 novel ‘Gadsby’ by Ernest Vincent Wright, which contains fifty thousand words—and not a single letter ‘e’. In lipogram service, however, no writer in English has ever equaled [sic] the achievement of the Spanish writer Carlos Ibañez, who in each of his twenty-eight novels banished a single and different letter of the Spanish alphabet’ (p. 154). I have done this sort of thing myself, once writing a short play for a Faculty end-of-year Christmas celebration where all heads of department were asked to provide an entertaining item to the rest of the staff that would demonstrate their particular foci. I wrote the play, ‘In search of the schwa’, where I omitted the schwa entirely, and allotted a role to be played by each member of the department where they were to look for it in their work, but had none in any of the dialogue they were to speak. It is the sort of thing that what Lederer calls a ‘wordaholic’ might do. I had great fun writing it, and members of staff had great fun performing it, and I have to say it was most effective in entertaining the audience. Have never managed to get it published, though.

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