Tuesday, 18 April 2017

Lipogram

The Beloved's brother is typo designer. I know he scoots through The Blob sometimes since sometimes he'll send lists of the typos he's found in recent postings:
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BTW couple of ‘a’s missing from The mould unbroken:
I'll tell you a parable about that. Years ago, about when I was getting born, my gaffer PhD supervisor was a teenager in Caribou, Maine. Not place sparkling with opportunity but a boy needs money and he got a job in a local feed-store. 
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Very helpful since I know I must let some errors slip out when scribbling out 600 words in the wee hours of the morning while holding some boiling hot bevvy in my other fist. I check things through following the first frenetic go but I've job to get to & sometimes I miss egregious boo-boos.

In 1969, Georges Perec, quite the weird French writer published his book in which the letter E did not present itself, except I suppose for the four times in the writer's monicker over the title [L count 'em]. Quite the coup, eh?, since E is the commonest letter in French & English both. When written into English, the book presented twice the work to the fellow who succeeded 'fiendishly': to keep close to the story but work within the deleted Es controls too.

The post-title is the word used for such writerly conceits [here's the reference which is subtly self-referencing]. The word comes from the Greek λειπογράμματος = omitting one letter. Perec did not suggest his effort to be the first to try going E-less, the honour goes to Ernest Vincent Wright who wrote 50,000 E-less words whose full-text is to be found here, for, written in 1939, the book is out of copyright. Perec belonged to Oulipo, the group of lingo nerds who constructed wordy oddities to bemuse other people. More on Wright & Perec. I guess they could both be dubbed surtout inoffensive.

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