In 1939, the American novelist Ernest Vincent Wright self-published the 50,000-word novel Gadsby, a lipogram in which the letter “e” does not appear. Since “e” is the most common letter in English, producing a sustained work that is e-less is a tricky thing to do.
You might be asking yourself, “Then why do it? Isn’t it just a pointless exercise?”
Well, is writing a sonnet a pointless exercise? That has plenty of constraints, too, if it is to be a proper sonnet.
But to move from the literary to the political realm, I suspect that writing a novel—or perhaps I should say, “a work”—without the fifth, you know—is akin to writing about Elon Musk’s dust-up with Donald Trump without using, oh no, “bromance.”
In part, it’s a matter of nausea avoidance. If I read another headline with that silly neologism, I might just scream.
So I am going to avoid it here (and, no, I haven’t used the word; I have merely mentioned it).
The amusing aspect of this little drama is that it revolves around the Mr. Etna-like eruption of knowing commentary by people who know nothing about Trump, Musk, their relationship, or what really precipitated their break—if, that is, there really has been a break and not just a bit of calculated theater.
About all that, I know exactly as much as you do, which is to say, nothing.
No one would describe what has happened—or, rather, what is happening still—between them as a personal example of the stately quadrille, the movement of European alliances in the eighteenth century that danced to tunes established by the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748). That set concluded with the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, in which Austria changed partners from Britain to France, while Prussia linked arms with Britain.
To read what some in the commentariat have been writing, you might conclude that the Musk-Dump-Trump routine was a world historical event worthy of analysis by Talleyrand or Henry Kissinger.
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Author: Ruth King
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