LMNOP

Ella Minnow Pea is an amazing, artful, laugh-out-loud funny book.

(Aside: I'm a wish list tramp -- one of those who frequently trolls other people's lists not to buy, but to steal ideas. I found this one on Judith's list. It's actually an instance of the principle that Epinions is banking on: you trust your friends' opinions more than others'. Sometimes blind collaborative filtering just won't cut it.)

Anyhoo. The book is "A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable." Deconstruct that: It's a story told through the character's letters to each other; one by one, certain letters of the alphabet are stricken from the the text.

The fable is set on the fictional island of Nollop, named after the creator of the famous sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." That sentence contains all 26 letters of the alphabet in only 36 letters total -- 10 duplicates -- and it's enshrined on a statue in the town. One by one, the letters start to fall off, and the town council members (and thus the author) banish them from use.

It's fascinating and funny to see common words replaced by awkward substitutes: Satto-Gatto for Saturday, Oompahpah for October, exanimate for dead. But some of the replacements are so natural as to be unnoticeable, which causes one to wonder: would English really be so different if suddenly K disappeared? Probably not. But if K, D, H, W, R, and X all went together...

And that's how the book goes. At first, the change is imperceptible (except in the psychological effect on the residents, who are terrified of thoughtless slips). But soon, the grammar and diction are more formal and contrived. Eventually, as residents begin using phonetic spellings, it's suddenly very, very hard to decipher -- I had to resort to reading passages out loud. It was both satisfying and, well, embarrassing to finally figure out what a certain word was supposed to be: "phir...ti...ph... oh, furtive."

I won't ruin the story for you, but go go! Read read! Especially if you study, teach, or in any way work with any languages, English or otherwise.