Back when George W Shrub stole the US presidency, the departing Democrat administration reportedly pried off the letter 'w' from the White House computer keyboards. In the spirit of things at the time, I wrote a column without using the letter 'w'. It turned out to be easier and much more fun than writing verse. The byline presented a bit of problem since my surname starts with 'w' but I thought maybe I could circumvent that with two v's set close together. In any case, in the spirit of not having to sub my own work, I left that to the sub to worry about. In the end, the column was spiked but I enjoyed the literary exercise anyway.
Now here's more literary gymnastics. How do you sub/layout a page without hyphens? And it's not ragged-right so you have to break words at some point. You could maybe force some line breaks but imagine doing this for every line of every column. And it's not a frivolous literary exercise this time but damn serious. There's a sponsor who doesn't want hyphens on his page (!) and the poor sub (not me, thank goD) is tearing her hair out.
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