A Word From ...
Maria had a little sheep: Literary Lipograms
Tony Augarde looks at the bizarre art of lipograms and the authors who have given themselves the challenge of omitting letters from their literary efforts.
James Thurber’s The Wonderful O is a story about a country where the letter ‘O’ is forbidden by a man named Black, who says: ‘I’ve had a hatred of this letter ever since the night my mother became wedged in a porthole.’ The result of this ban, says Thurber, was that ‘Little Goody Two Shoes lost her Os, and so did Goldilocks, and the former became a whisper, and the latter sounded like a key jiggled in a lck [sic].’
This is like the form of word play called a lipogram, in which a particular letter of the alphabet is deliberately omitted from a piece of verse or prose. It may seem an esoteric pastime but it has been practised for centuries.
Lipograms have been written in Latin, English, French, Spanish, and many other languages.
In 1939 an American named Ernest Vincent Wright composed a 50,000-word novel called Gadsby without using the letter E, the letter which normally occurs most often in English. Wright said that he tied down the bar for E on his typewriter so that he wouldn’t accidentally use the letter.
Writing lipograms may seem a futile pastime but it stretches the mind (like all the best wordplay) and it also provides excellent practice in finding alternative ways of expressing things. One favourite challenge is to take a nursery rhyme and rewrite it, missing out a common letter. A. Ross Eckler did this with the verse of Mary Had a Little Lamb, which, to refresh your memory, is:
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.
It followed her to school one day,
Which was against the rule;
It made the children laugh and play
To see a lamb in school.
Eckler rewrote this in five different versions which respectively omitted the letters A, E, H, S, and T. This is his way of rewording the rhyme to omit its 22 occurrences of the letter A:
Its fleece shone white like snow,
Every region where Polly went
The sheep did surely go;
He followed her to school one time,
Which broke the rigid rule;
The children frolicked in their room
To see the sheep in school.
Eckler went even further, removing half the letters from the alphabet and coming up with this version which uses only A, C, D, E, H, I, L, M, N, P, R, S, and T:
As pale as rime its hair,
And all the places Maria came
The sheep did tail her there;
In Maria’s class it came at last,
A sheep can’t enter there;
It made the children clap their hands
A sheep in class, that’s rare.
Tony Augarde is the author of The Oxford Guide to Word Games, The Oxford A to Z of Word Games, and Oxford Word Challenge.
Taken from an article that first appeared in Limited Edition, the monthly magazine of The Oxford Times ( www.thisisoxfordshire.co.uk ).