Gadsby
A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter “E”
by Ernest Vincent Wright, Ernest Wright · first published 1939
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An entire story of over 50,000words written without the use of the letter "E".
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Two other unusual and clever language constructions are xkcd's Up Goer Five a description of a Saturn 5 rocket using only words contained in the 1000 words of basic English, see [1], and Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright, a novel of 50,000 words without using the letter e, see [2]. [1] https://xkcd.com/1133/ [2] https://www.abebooks.com/books/gadsby-lipogram/
on “How I Met My Wife (1994)” ↗I want to see an LLM that generates answers without the letter 'e', like the novel Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright.
on “The "it" in AI models is the dataset” ↗I had heard about "Gadsby" first, so when high school friends told me they were reading "The Great Gatsby", I was quite confused about why their English class would assign a book most known for not using the letter 'e'.
on “That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer” ↗There's room for a product that is not fully featured, especially one that is intentionally not fully featured. Constraints are often a good thing for art. The novel "Gadsby", written without the letter E, is not the finest point of english literature, but is certainly novel and better for it. Limitations, speaking eloquently, and conveying your message through simple form…
on “Twitter Plans to Go Beyond Its 140-Character Limit” ↗…very strongly to describe Tlön from an in-universe perspective. (People who've read the story will understand why!) A kind of analogous later Wikipedia edit war had to do with whether the article about Gadsby (the lipographic novel that doesn't use the letter E) should be written with the same constraint as the novel itself, and also whether the article on E-Prime (an approach to writing English without using…
on “Borges and Money” ↗…such as OO, when they make the most sense to do so. I'd argue a "pure" functional language is akin to trying to write a novel on a keyboard without an "e" key. Sure, you'll eventually stumble and write "Gadsby", but there are times when being able to cheat is useful in making your code more clear and concise. When I code stuff in C++ or C#, I keep my objects immutable most of the time because it's the easiest…
on “ClojureScript is the most-used functional language that compiles to JavaScript” ↗> It's still impressive---imagine writing 1000 words of English without reusing any function words like "the", "it", "of", "is". How about: > Gadsby is a [260-page] 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright which includes only four words that contain the letter E, the most common letter in English. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
on “Thousand Character Classic” ↗Reminds me of "Gadsby", a 50.000 word novel without the letter "e": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
on “Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)” ↗Also Gadsby by Ernest Wright
on “Goto (2007)” ↗