I bet you’re wondering what a lipogram is. Um, a telegram with lips?

It might help to think of a pangram, which as we know is a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet. A lipogram is more or less the opposite of this. Instead of including every letter, you deliberately leave out a particular letter. The word comes from ancient Greek—lipo, meaning “lacking,” and gramma meaning—you guessed it—“letter.”

Writing lipograms goes right back to at least the sixth century BC, when a Greek poet deliberately wrote verses where none of the words contained the letter S. This is called a lipogram on S. The question is—why did he do this?

NOBODY KNOWS.

In the eighteenth century, the German poet Gottlob Burmann wrote 130 poems without the letter R—lipograms on R. He was even said to have avoided using any words with the letter R in his everyday speech! Try that—oops, I mean, attempt that!

Okay, but why?

DON’T ASK ME.

Of course, it’s easier to write a lipogram on a letter that is not very common, like Z or Q. It’s much much harder harder to write a lipogram on a letter like E, which is the most common letter in several languages, including English and French.  Despite this, is 1939 Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a whole novel, Gadsby, without using a single E. He said that it was so difficult to write this book that he had to tie down the letter E on the keyboard of his typewriter to stop himself from using it. And following in his footsteps, in 1969 the French writer Georges Perec published a 300-page novel that contained no E’s. It’s called La Disparition, which means “The Disappearance.” (Where did that E go?)

But the question is—WHY? Why do writers even want to do these strange things? What’s wrong with just ordinary sentences?

Well, I suppose it’s because writers love language so much, they just want to play with it all day long to see what they can make it do, like making models out of clay. They are like experimenters in a laboratory. Hmm, they wonder, what would happen if I did this? Or this? Where would this take me?

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Excerpted from The Word Snoop by Ursula Dubosarky with permission of the publisher, Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group. Copyright © 2009 by Ursula Dubosarsky.