I am not sure when it started. For as long as I can remember I have loved words, and word games. Word searches, crossword puzzles, word jumbles, and cryptograms. Give me a newspaper, and the first thing I look for are these word-things. Yeah, I know a newspaper has lots of other words in it. But I like the fun aspect of words. Puns, word-plays, and the like.
However, I didn't realize how serious my addiction is until I was recently compelled to buy a book. Simply because of a unique word-thing. I read a blog post somewhere entitled, "The 10 Most Difficult Books to Write". One of the books featured in the post was called Gadsby, and the thing which made that book so difficult to write is the fact that the author completely left out the letter "e". From the entire novel! I couldn't even imagine attempting such a thing and felt I had to read that book. So I quickly got on Amazon and ordered myself a copy. Gadsby was written in 1939 by Ernest Vincent Wright and is a charming story about a little town and the people who live there. I noticed a funny thing about myself, though, as I read the tale. Page after page, I realized I was far more concerned about determining where the author was avoiding use of words containing the letter "e" than I was interested in following the story-line. Sometimes it was easy to spot. Like when he wrote "Dumbo's cousin" instead of "elephant", or "grand church ritual" instead of "wedding". But other times I had to guess. Did he write "hard, gruff ways" to avoid saying "stern"? Was "big shouting officials" meant to replace "policemen"?And so I read - enjoying the story, but having a lot more fun guessing where an "e" might have been used had Mr. Wright not taken on his challenge. Now you know how a Word Nerd has fun. *wink*
1 comment:
That's fun! I can't imagine how hard it would be to write a book like an E either!
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