We hear a lot about floating signifiers and how they bob anchorless around on the deep waters of meaning; we hear too little about sinking signifiers, or language items that have stopped bobbing and been sent silently to the bottom, if not for the duration then at least provisionally, while we see how well we can do without them. To scuttle a signifier in this way is to play at lipograms, an elementary language game that has been around for two and a half millennia. This lipo has nothing to do with fat, or with the world of the liposuctionist's hoover: it comes from a Greek verb meaning to 'leave out'. The lipogram is a piece of writing from which one or more letters of the alphabet have been excluded, preferably common ones if the game is to be worth playing. There is in theory no reason why there shouldn't also be spoken lipograms, or lipophones - indeed, I can imagine that, the bit once between their teeth, composers of lipograms find themselves talking lipogrammatically, either because they can't stop or because they think it will help them to keep their eye in.

LRB 10 November 1994 | PDF Download