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Comment by stepanhruda | Hacker News Reader

I have Thing Explainer right here, my main issue is I'd like a separate version with the actual terms so I can have a conversation about the covered topics without sounding like a moron.

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I'm not sure why you got downvoted for that. It's a reasonable request. Restrict yourself to the thousand words for words, but not for names.

What I think would be interesting is if he tried another version without the 1000 most common words.

I don't think it's possible to form non-trivial sentences without function words. But leaving out common content words could be interesting.

Someone wrote a 260 pages long novel without using a single word that contains the letter 'e'. That seems impossible to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29

There are multiple examples. It is difficult but apparently not so difficult that nobody attempts it. The accepted term for texts like that is "lipogram"; it's a popular form of the broader category of constrained writing.

Wikipedia has a page for "logology" which is apparently a term for the general activity of playing with language in that kind of way on a per-letter basis (so, including anagrams and palindromes, etc.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logology

If you sort all English words by frequency, the ones that contain 'e' would be distributed more or less randomly, so it seems more doable. Banning the first 1000 would prevent you from using the most useful words. I don't think you could construct sentences that wouldn't sound totally weird.

I know, it's fascinating. But it doesn't detract from my point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void (from the original _La Disparition_)

is a noir/fantasy story, its actual plot is the story's lack of 'e'.

It's amazing. It's difficult and confusing to follow the writing, but it's an amazing book.

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