A.W.A.D. - Words About Words

Imagine you've just started your great epic novel and one of the keys on your keyboard is broken. It would be trivial to manage without a Q, X, or Z, but writing without a single E -- ah, that'd be some challenge. If it sounds undoable, consider that whole books have been written without an E, the most used letter in the English language. Without an E, one has to give up some of the most common pronouns such as he, she, we, me, and so on. What's more, even the article "the" is barred.

Coming back to books written without Es (I'm sure writing them is not something everyone can do with ease), Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby is written without the second vowel. One of the best known E-less works is Georges Perec's lipogrammatic French novel, La Disparition (The Disappearance). Its plot is full of wordplay, puzzles, and other word-fun.

For example, a character is missing eggs, or is unable to remember his name because it needs E in the spelling. Though it may be hard to believe considering the restriction under which it is written, the novel is said to be quite engrossing. Apparently, many reviewers were not even aware that a special constraint was used in writing it. After writing the novel, Perec faced a protest from the A, I, O, and U keys on his keyboard that they had to do all the work and E was leading an e'sy life. So Perec had no choice but to write a short work called Les Revenentes, where he put to work all those idle Es: the only vowel used was E.

If that doesn't sound incredible enough, here is more. La Disparition has been translated into English as "A Void" by Gilbert Adair. Of course, the translation also doesn't have any E in it. In case you have not already noticed, both the phrases "La Disparition" and "A Void" have only vowels A, I, and O in them, same as in the word "lipogram". And Void's protagonist is named Anton Vowl.

One can write numbers from zero, one, two... onwards, and not use the A key on the keyboard until reaching thousand. As for the literary merit of that composition, I'm not very certain.

lipogram
(LIP-uh-gram) noun
A piece of writing that avoids one or more letters of the alphabet.

[From Greek lipo- (lacking) + gram (something written).]

In spite of what it sounds like, a lipogram is not a message with a kiss. Lipogram is a work written with a constraint.

godwottery

(god-WOT-uhr-ee) noun
1. Gardening marked by an affected and elaborate style.
2. Affected use of archaic language.

[From the line "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!" in a poem by Thomas Edward Brown (1830-1897).]

Now here is a word with a dual personality. Poet T.E. Brown unwittingly helped coin it when he wrote a poem describing his garden filled with all that came to his mind: grotto, pool, ferns, roses, fish, and more.

And when he needed a word to rhyme with the line "Rose plot," he came up with "God wot!" He used "wot", an archaic term that's a variant of wit (to know), to mean "God knows!" and it stood out among other contemporary words in the poem.

If you wish to create your own godwottery, we recommend: sundials, gnomes, fairies, plastic sculptures, fake rockery, pump-driven streams, and wrought-iron furniture. A pair of pink flamingos will round it out nicely.

allonym
(AL-uh-nim) noun

The name of a person, usually historical, taken by an author as a pen name (as opposed to using a fictional pseudonym).

[From French allonyme, from Greek allo- (other) + -onym (name).]

When one borrows the content of another's book, it's called plagiarism. But when merely an author's name is lifted, the term is allonym.

Sometimes it's done for parody. When hired by someone to do so, it's known as ghostwriting. An example of a work written under an allonym is The Federalist, also known as Federalist Papers. This collection of 85 essays about the US Constitution was written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison during 1787-1788. They chose to write under the name Publius in honor of this Roman official for his role in in setting up the Roman Republic.

Some people believe that Shakespeare's works were written by various authors who used his allonym. Writing a great novel might be a breeze but choosing what to call your pseudonym, that's not easy! You could simply call it your pen name or byname.

If you wish to appear sophisticated, you might say it is your nom de plume or nom de guerre. If you reversed your own name to coin a nickname, it would be an ananym. But why not take a walk in the library, browse the spines, and select an allonym?

heterography
(het-uh-ROG-ruh-fee) noun
1. A spelling different from the one in current use.

2. Use of the same letter(s) to convey different sounds, for example, gh in rough and ghost.

[From Greek hetero (different) + -graphy (writing).]

The idea of heterography is a recent phenomenon, relatively speaking. Earlier, when English was mainly a spoken language, it was a free-for-all, spelling-wise. Any spelling was good as long as you could make yourself understood. Each writer spelled words in his own way, trying to spell them phonetically. Shakespeare spelled his own name in various ways (Shaxspear, Shakespear, and so on).

If you read old manuscripts, you can find different spellings of a word on the same page, and sometimes even in the same sentence. Spelling wasn't something sacrosanct: if a line was too long to fit, a typesetter might simply squeeze or expand the word by altering the spelling.

If the idea of to-each-one's-own spelling for the same word sounds bizarre, consider how we practice it even today, in the only place we can: in our names. Look around you and you might find a Christina and a Cristina and a Kristina and many other permutations and combinations.

With the advent of printing in the 15th century, spelling began to become standardized. By the 19th century, most words had a single "official" spelling, as a consensus, not by the diktat of a committee.

Today if you write "definately" and someone points out that you've misspelled the word, just tell them you're a practitioner of heterography.

neologist
(nee-OL-uh-gist) noun

One who coins, uses, or introduces new words, or redefines old words in a language.

[From French néologisme, from Greek neo- (new) + -logy (science, study).]

A language grows by infusion of new words. Anyone who has been on the Internet for more than a few days knows what a webmaster is. Yet only a few years ago if we came across a "webmaster", we wouldn't know what that person did for a living.

There are many ways to coin words. You can make words out of thin air: googol, a word for a very large number (1 followed by 100 zeros) was coined by a nine-year-old boy. It was the inspiration behind the naming of the Google search engine. You can redefine old words. The Google name, in turn, became genericized as a verb meaning to search for something, not necessarily on the Web.

You can sandwich two existing words (web + master) or you can fuse them together: lexpert (lex + expert), someone who is an expert in words. Such an amalgamated word is also known as a portmanteau (from French, meaning a bag for carrying clothes, one that opens on two sides) since Lewis Carroll gave them this moniker in his 1872 classic "Through the Looking-Glass". Carroll himself coined some great portmanteaux, such as chortle (chuckle + snort), and slithy (slimy + lithe).

Coining words is easy. Getting them into a dictionary, now that's a topic for another time.