Oulipo was a rather fascinating literary movement originating in France that focused on so-called "constrained writing" techniques. The most famous example is Georges Perec's 3pp-page novel A Void, which is lippogrammatic for (excluding) the letter E entirely. It's harder than it sounds. Other examples include palindromes (something that reads the same backwards and forwards), univocalisms (when words have only one vowel), and snowball poems (where each word is a letter longer). All of this is particularly fascinating to me, especially as someone who's failed at making a lot of Oulipo poems. Even more fascinating is the word's etymology - Oulipo is an acronym of the phrase Ouvroir de litterature potentiell, which, roughly translated, means "workshop of potential literature" in French.
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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