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31 October 2008

This is why Wikip[e]dia is so cool. →[More:]

Through my curiosity, I found a Wiki information bit on Vin Wright's book "Gadsby: Champion of Youth".

In his work of fiction, Wright "painstakingly omits a particularly common glyph from all its many paragraphs". This may sound familiar to you...

Starting his manuscript in longhand, Wright brought it to fruition through manual typing — but "blacking" (Indy), or tying down, a solitary typing bar with string, so as to forbid nonlipogrammatic words that "might slip in..."


And: an astounding thing is that said Wiki bit also omits all similar nonlipogrammatic glyphs!

Cool.
post by: Specklet at: 18:24 | 18 comments
My keyboard has been lipogrammatic for the letter "J" for some time. But I keep a notepad file open with the capital and lower case ones and paste them in whenever I need one.

I'm not sure what this says about me but I'm pretty sure it's nothing good.
posted by Fuzzbean 31 October | 19:26
But I keep a notepad file open with the capital and lower case ones and paste them in whenever I need one.

Tell me you're kidding, right? RIGHT? My God, I'll be thinking about this forever unless you tell me you're not really doing that...
posted by DarkForest 31 October | 19:45
Keyboards are CRAZY CHEAP, you know.... just sayin' ....
posted by BitterOldPunk 31 October | 19:53
I'm...um...

No. Sorry, I'm seriously not kidding.

Would it make you feel better if I told you I never touch my mouse/trackpad and so it's really almost as fast? Really? I swear? (And it's a laptop so I'd have to go through all kinds of crap to get it dealt with and really I'm just lazy and okay, fine, it's totally unjustifiable that it's been going on for this long and I LIVE IN SHAME.)
posted by Fuzzbean 31 October | 20:02
No. Sorry, I'm seriously not kidding.

Actually, that's the geekiest thing ever, making it pretty cool.

Thanks for the screen photo. Now I know that other people can see my comments and it's not just some kind of damn javascript trick making me only think I'm commenting.
posted by DarkForest 31 October | 20:20
Oh, it would also probably make a great youtube video, watching you enter a sentence with a lot of Js in it, seeing what your technique was for doing it quickly.
posted by DarkForest 31 October | 20:32
It's not actually that exciting - ctrl-V is paste, and a "j" of some nature is in my clipboard 80% of the time anyway...so if I need the *other* one I just ctrl-tab between my work window and the text file, use the arrows and shift to highlight the other one, ctrl-C, ctrl-tab, ctrl-V.

And it took a hell of a lot longer to think about how I actually do all of those than it does to actually do it.
posted by Fuzzbean 31 October | 20:36
Alt-Tab, Ctrl-C, Alt-Tab, Ctrl-V, I'm guessing (or, y'know, a slight variation on that). Probably a good thing that, outside of proper names, 'j' isn't a particularly frequently occurring letter in English. Suggestion for improvement: if you put Jj on one line, it seems like it would reduce the number of keystrokes slightly.

(I also think that's pretty awesome.)
posted by box 31 October | 20:37
Oh, whoops. Box is right, it's alt-tab not ctrl-tab. See? I can't explain these things, I just do them.
posted by Fuzzbean 31 October | 20:39
Ctrl-Tab (and Shift-Ctrl-Tab) moves between tabs in Firefox (and at least a few other programs, though I can't think of any right at this moment).
posted by box 31 October | 20:43
Just knowing theres someone out there doing this makes me smile.

You could remap a less used key to j/J, but then you might be screwed up for life when typing on other keyboards.
posted by DarkForest 31 October | 20:43
I use ctrl-page up/down to move between FF tabs. I didn't know about Ctrl-Tab doing the same thing.

The one arena in which this has really cramped my style is online java-based crossword puzzles. I can't do them anymore, or I can fill in all but the j's. Sad panda.
posted by Fuzzbean 31 October | 20:50
ASCII codes could be handy, too! Though, it does sound like you've got your process down, and impressively so.

Don't be a sad panda!
posted by Frisbee Girl 31 October | 20:55
Thinking and writing lipogrammatically for that particular glyph is surprisingly difficult. It feels seems is not unlike dissimilar to talking like in the manner a fashion that recalls is reminiscent brings to mind (phew! aah, finally) Porky Pig.
posted by Joe Invisible 31 October | 21:49
One of my friends uses a '4' in place of his broken 'h' key. Since it's been a few months now, it's going to be fun to see what happens when he has his h back (due either to a new laptop or FINALLY getting it fixed).
posted by unsurprising 31 October | 23:02
When I took the GRE I kept hitting ctrl-V to try to type "j". The computers for the GRE don't allow any clipboard functions. It was very frustrating and took an embarrassingly long time to retrain. I still run into trouble on my other computer.
posted by Fuzzbean 31 October | 23:40
(phew! aah, finally) Porky Pig.

Ahaa haa haaa!
posted by Specklet 01 November | 06:45
Egadsby.
posted by stilicho 01 November | 14:43
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