Lipograms and so on

I’m a fan of writing with constraints, in which an author insists upon choosing words that satisfy a condition. By this, I’m talking about things in grammar or linguistics, not topics of writing. A kind of this is a lipogram, in which a glyph—occasionally a consonant, but usually A, say, or I—is conspicuous only by its omission. This post is such a composition.

Why might an author find this fascinating? I cannot say this would apply to all, but I find it a kind of sport. I can find it taxing, I must say, and naturally frustrating if I spot an unthinking inclusion of a word that is struck out of my dictionary of valid options. But it is most distracting, particularly as a virus is around, to focus on finding a lipogrammatic string of words that sounds good. Or slightly good.

Also, if I am looking at a lipogram (or similar) that is a product of a distinct hand than my hand, it is intriguing to draw conclusions on what phrasings got around any and all limits. Not to look as if I’m posing, but I can only say I think it is a kind of art, with its own notions of form and function.

This kind of writing is on this blog in old posts. If you look at my post about a botanical location in London, I took inspiration from sounding out its district: at first an A is found, a capital B follows, and so on. But no prior post is a lipogram akin to this. It was a hazy possibility at various points, but not put in action. Finally, I got around to doing it in this post. But that old horticultural visit’s post is an illustration of an additional thing I find to my liking: burying virtual gold by hiding things in words, in plain sight. You may say “a-ha!” if you spot what that sand is on top of—it’s a small gift waiting for you, as thanks for staring hard at ink or at light on a monitor.

This post will clock in at a total of words not topping a thousand, so isn’t particularly skilful. A long lipogrammatic work is a book I know by Mark Dunn—I cannot (with this limit) say what Dunn calls it, but I can say that its sound is “LMNOP”. This book’s story occurs on a fictional island (Nollop) on which a fictional man (also Nollop) is a focus of worship owing to his coining of a famous saying about a lazy dog and a quick brown fox. But an inscription of this saying on a bust of him starts to fall apart—and so, taking this as a sign that Mr. Nollop is unhappy, a council of lords of Nollop, if a symbol falls, prohibit nationals of Nollop from using it. As Dunn’s book is a compilation of communications from Nollopians, thus that glyph has to vanish from any writing in his book.

Scholars think Lasus, a Doric chap from two thousand orbits around our Sun ago, was known for first choosing to put ink on scroll to bring a lipogram into this world. Sigma, a symbol of Lasus’s folk, was not to his liking, and so Lasus sought to avoid it. Various authors from his part of history did similar things.

A non-lipogram composition with constraints that has notability is a variation on a song (sans music) by a Victorian author about a bird: I cannot say which assignation can apply to this author, nor this bird. In this, a word’s glyph count is also a digit of pi, which ratio is that of two parts of a round thing in maths. A work with additional words, but an analogous constraint, was also built up.  It has many parts, and I do not think I will wind up at its final stanza.

A final amusing thing I will talk about is an xkcd comic containing a diagram about how Saturn V works—this is a flying car by NASA that would go to our Moon, long ago. Randall, who draws that comic, had a limit of only a thousand common words—which, in fact, did not allow him to apply “thousand” to discuss what words could or couldn’t occur. In this comic, it spawns a narration of Saturn’s workings that is amusingly childish, with phrasings such as “you will not go to [our Moon] today”. This would prompt Randall to publish a book that has similar diagrams of additional “things”.

But, anyway, this is my having a bash at this lipogram thing. It’s a short blog post if I’m comparing to normal, but this is hard to do. It’s probably also a bit torturous for visitors to Avoiding Oxford, as I must now call my blog. I would vow that posts on Sundays going forward will contain all glyphs—making such posts pangrams as against lipograms. But forcing inclusions of Qs and Zs is as awful as avoiding this lingo’s most common symbol, so possibly not.

If you find that this post is not your thing, you should submit a topic on my contact form.