Follow posts tagged #english, #language, and #french in seconds.

Sign up

Riverdance Is Not a Verb: an essay about Irish dance

I recently wrote this essay about Irish dance for my English class. He and I both think it’s rather good so I want to share it with all y’all.

Read More

Eunoia, by Christian Bök

archives.chbooks.com

The word ‘eunoia’, which literally means ‘beautiful thinking’, is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Eunoia is a five-chapter book by Christian Bök in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram (the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter only E, etc.). Each vowel takes on a distinct personality:– the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (Bök actually retells the entire Iliad in Chapter E; you have to read it to believe it).

It’s interesting to see just how far language can be stretched without breaking; in this case, by only using one vowel per chapter (but 98% of the available vocabulary). The entire book Eunoia is available to read free at the link, and it’s well worth clicking around even though I doubt that most people read the whole thing. 

Loading more posts...