Lipogrammatic text

[geoffreycaveney]

I don't think a lipogrammatic text which redacts entire words makes any sense.
I would suggest that the medieval mindset would have led to a substitution of the prohibited word, rather than an attempt to remove it altogether - what would be the point in a long text?
It would end up like those old narrative fiction novels that blank out names... as in The Earl of - who led the Regiment of - went to Canterbury in 17-....
You end up saying "what? Who? When?" to yourself and have no idea what's going on. (They did it, it seems, to prevent any mistakes creeping in which might lead to a lawsuit from a real Earl for having been defamed, or to avoid the attention of the political censors).
So instead, in a personal diary, you'd write the Earl of xyz, and know that, actually, you're talking about Ronald McDonald or whoever. Which is the way medieval ciphers worked - they tended to just encipher nouns or pre-arranged phrases

It was extremely exhausting to write, and I expect it will probably be rather painful to read as well.

.You should have just written it normally, then used search & replace

Composing a true lipogrammatic text in its purest form is rather more complicated than simply redacting, removing, or even substituting for any words that contain the prohibited letter or letters. For certain names and nouns, yes, you can just use a code name or a synonym or a near synonym. For some other words, yes, you can also try to find a synonym or a near synonym as a substitute word or phrase or circumlocution. But I can now tell you from recent personal experience, it is not always so easy to do this! And for certain grammatical structures, a simple substitution method can be well nigh impossible or nearly so.

For example, yes, you could just decide to always replace "and" with the word "with". I wish I had thought of that before I began writing my lipogrammatic text   It is not exactly precisely the same thing, but yes I accept that it is close enough for most purposes in a lipogrammatic text. However, other grammatical and function words are harder to handle in such a simple manner. What would you do with the word "a" or "an" in such a text? If you just leave them out, that really changes the grammatical structure of English. I do recall that in some places I tried to simply use "some" in place of "a". I felt that was slightly "less bad English" than using "one", for example. But that was a stylistic judgment, so to speak, in each instance, not a blanket "search & replace" type of decision. 

And how would you search & replace for "are", "was", "has", "have", "had", "am", "be", "been", "can", "able", any word ending in "-able"/"-ible", etc.? English does not simply have ready-made substitute synonyms for each and every such grammatical or function word. One has to think through carefully how to express the same or a similar thought or idea using a different phrasing that does not use any of these words that contain a prohibited letter or letters. For example, maybe in some cases you can replace "have" with "possess". But then when you apply this "search & replace" formula to the phrase "I have gone", the result becomes "I possess gone"! Is that a "word salad", a search & replace lipogram gone wrong, or some kind of actual cipher? It may not always be so easy to tell the difference between these possibilities.

Here is another example from my own personal extreme lipogram-writing experience: In some instances it may be simple to replace the word "say" with "express", for example. But I felt it did not work in the case of the phrase "I should say". This is an idiomatic phrase with a very particular meaning and particular contexts in which it is used. "I should express" simply makes no sense as a substitute phrase in many instances. I finally settled on the long circumlocution "is how I should express it" as a replacement phrase, in the sentence, "One more time I see I must delete it, well, edit it, I should say," which thus then became "One more time I see I must delete it, well, edit it, is how I should express it." This is why I say (ahem, I express) it was extremely exhausting to write.