By TERRY PUGH
A ‘pangram’ is a sentence that uses all 26 letters of the English alphabet. The best-known example of a pangram is: ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’
Obviously, nobody needs to employ every single letter in all their sentences. In fact, most of the time we use relatively few.
Of those 26 letters, 20 are full-time consonants and only five (‘a,’ ‘e,’ ‘i,’ ‘o’ and ‘u’) are full-time vowels. The letter ‘y’ is basically a consonant that performs part-time vowel duties as a side-hustle.
But, even though they’re a minority in the alphabet population, vowels are still pretty important. Could we communicate if one was missing?
Martensville author Dianne Young, whose many published books range from whimsical children’s tales to reflective adult essays, decided it would be fun to find out whether a particular vowel could be purposely excluded from a story and still have it make sense.
So she did exactly that.
She took a half-dozen time-honoured children’s fairy tales and re-wrote them in an entertaining way using her own illustrations. The kicker is that in each book, one vowel is conspicuously absent. (Coincidentally, because her name contains all six vowels, she also omits the excluded letter in her byline on each cover.)
“I decided to challenge myself,” said Young in an interview. “I had a few false starts, but overall, the writing part was fun. I had to come up with alternative words in lots of cases in order to stay true to the story.”
For example, in ‘Goldilocks and the Trio of Bruins’ she couldn’t use the letter ‘e’ in the story. In ‘Snow White Plus the Seven Short Guys’, the letter ‘a’ was excluded.
“I had a thesaurus handy, but mostly I came up with the different ways of wording things just by thinking about it,” she said. “Eventually, after a while it would come to me.”
Still, even after several drafts, she sometimes found a forbidden vowel had somehow wormed its way into the manuscript despite her best efforts.
“We take the letters for granted so much that we miss them hiding in plain sight,” she said. “You don’t realize how many times you want to use the word ‘the’ in a sentence. If you’re trying to write without using the letter ‘e’ then you have to come up with a different word.
“I suggested to a teacher friend of mine that this would be a great lesson on word choices for kids. Get them to rewrite a sentence or a story without using a certain vowel.
“It gets us away from using normal, everyday words, and helps to expand our vocabulary if we look for different ways to say things.”
Young said when she initially wrote the stories, she took them to her writing group for feedback.
“I gave them the books, but I didn’t mention to them that each one was written without a particular vowel,” she said. “They read them, and I got these strange, puzzled looks. Their comments were along the lines of, ‘This isn’t your usual type of writing. Your word choices are pretty weird’.”
Young said she initially wrote and published the six stories online as e-books. The other stories in her ‘Victims of Vowel Play’ series are: ‘The Three Not-So-Small Porkers’, ‘Little Red Riding Cape-with-a Hat-Attached,’ ‘The Non-Handsome Baby Mallard’ and ‘Sleeping QD’.
Recently, she decided to make limited-run print copies, putting two stories into a single volume, each with its own cover.
“It was a bit of a challenge, but I love learning new stuff,” said Young. “Each story was too short to be a stand-alone book, but two stories together made up enough pages to make it worthwhile. I remembered as a kid reading two-in-one books. On one side was one book, and when you flipped it over there was a second book on the other side. I thought I’d try that. It actually took quite a bit of figuring to get my printer to do what I wanted it to. That was more work than the writing part.”
The books can be found online at Young’s website (dianneyoung.ca) or her store (ourlittlebookshop.bigcartel.com).