[schoen]

Thanks! How I'd say that:

"Good job! I sought to say what I thought about your post in a similar fashion, but I found it wasn't as straightforward in actuality as it was in my anticipation."

This constraint is not what you could call most hard of all constraints that folks can comply with in writing. Many moons ago, I had many chats with a smart woman (an IT industry analyst, nowadays a VC!) using only four-symbol words (words just as long, or just as short, as "full" and "with"). All right, it wasn't always an option for us to comply fully with standard grammar; a substantial fraction of our writing did consist of partial phrasings (lacking a noun, or lacking an additional pars orationis, as folks would say in Latin -- say, "good work" and not "that's a good job"). Still, that woman and I could chat for a fairly long duration in this fashion, about a surprisingly broad array of topics.

I wish I had logs of our chats now, inasmuch as that constraint is fairly hard... I do think I said "Good Airs" in such a chat as a way of naming a capital city of a country south of Brazil. But much that I said is hard to think of now.

[riffraff]

For folks following this discussion, I don't know about Anglic works, but I think "la disparition"[0] and "All'alba Shahrazad andrà ammazzata"[1] show outstanding illustrations of lipograms for Italians and Gauls.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Disparition-French-Language-Georges-Pe...

[1] http://www.amazon.it/Allalba-Shahrazad-ammazzata-Giuseppe-Va...

[kybernetikos]

Seems to me that you would enjoy the Upgoer Five editor if you haven't already come across it: http://splasho.com/upgoer5/

[schoen]

Yup, I had a lot of fun with it in 2013.

Also, at MIT's annual January puzzling match, I had fun solving this most-common-thousand-words thing (it has a list of cool stuff that you can study at MIT if you want to know how to build flying things... but all in most-common-thousand-words-only fashion).

http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2013/enigmavalley.com/you_will_no...

Its solution is at

http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2013/enigmavalley.com/you_will_no...

I thought it was a Hunt classic and did honor to xkcd too.

[vitalique]

Nice try, but you still got an 'e' in your username )