Friday 3 February 2012

Only Twenty-Five in the Alphabet

A chap called Perec wrote a novel (in French) entirely without the letter ‘e’. Another fellow named Adair rendered it in our language, again without ‘e’. I’m not certain I could manage that, but maybe I’ll have a go at leaving out the twentieth letter of the alphabet. You know the one I mean, between ‘r’ and ‘t’.

I have to decide more than one thing though, like whether or not I’m allowed to do it the American way. They write with more of the letter ‘z’ than people from Britain. But that might be cheating. And can I write, for example, 17? And how bad can my grammar be?

You know, I think it might be even harder to exclude than ‘e’. Do you know how hard I found it to even write up to here? ‘E’ might be more common than any other, but with letter twenty, they come at the end of one form of nearly any verb you care to name. And how am I meant to form the plural of a typical noun? It will be harder than I initially thought.

How am I doing?

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