The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Lipograms
Letters, letters, letters

I bet you’re wondering what a lipogram is. Um, a telegram with lips?

It might help to think of a pangram, which as we know is a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet. A lipogram is more or less the opposite of this. Instead of including every letter, you deliberately leave out a particular letter. The word comes from ancient Greek—lipo, meaning “lacking,” and gramma,meaning—you guessed it—“letter.”

Writing lipograms goes right back to at least the sixth century BC, when a Greek poet deliberately wrote verses where none of the words contained the letter S. This is called a lipogram on S. The question is—why did he do this?

NOBODYKNOWS.

In the eighteenth century, the German poet Gottlob Burmann apparently wrote 130 poems without the letter R—lipograms on R. He was even said to have avoided using any words with the letter R in his everyday speech! Try that—oops, I mean, attempt that!

Okay, but why?

DON’T ASKME.

Of course, it’s easier to write a lipogram on a letter that is not very common, like Z or Q. It’s much much harder to write a lipogram on a letter like E, which is the most common letter in several languages, including English and French. Despite this, in 1939 Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a whole novel, Gadsby,without using a single E. He said that it was so difficult to write this book that he had to tie down the letter E on the keyboard of his typewriter to stop himself from using it. And following in his footsteps, in 1969 the French writer Georges Perec published a 300-page novel that also contained no E’s. It’s called La Disparition, which means “The Disappearance.” (Where did that E go?)

But the question is—WHY? Why do writers even want to do these strange things? What’s wrong with just ordinary old sentences?

Well, I suppose it’s because writers love language so much, they just want to play with it all day long to see what they can make it do, like making models out of clay. They are like experimenters in a laboratory. Hmm, they wonder, what would happen if I did this? Or this? Where would this take me?

Do you think you could make up a lipogram? (Or should I say, DO YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO?) Well, the Word Snoop has given it a whirl. Take a look at the sentences on the opposite page and see if you can work out what sort of lipograms they are . . .

Lipograms

1. For many days following, all boys and girls who had brought lollipops for lunch got a gold star.

2. I wonder why the huge octopus went to bed when the clock struck eleven?

3. Under his hat, the magician secretly kept a fluffy teddy bear.