The Plutogram

Oh, that's rich!

It’s a new week, so what better time to define a new literary form?

I’ve written now and again about lipograms. A lipogram eschews certain letters of the alphabet, or if you look at it another way, it only uses certain letters of the alphabet. A Void by Georges Perec uses every letter but e; Eunoia by Christian Bök uses only one vowel in each chapter; and a little while ago, I wrote a sketch using only the letters in “vegetarian.”

The word lipogram comes from “lipo-” meaning “leaving out,” and “gram,” meaning “letter.” I’m now proposing the new word plutogram, from “pluto-” meaning “richness, abundance,” and “gram” again.

The rules aren’t as firm for a plutogram as they are for a lipogram. If the “rule” of a lipogram is “never use [certain letters]” or “only use [certain letters],” then the “rule” of a plutogram is “use [certain letters] a lot.” Here’s a simple example:

This structure clumps up an unusual number of u’s.

The sentence above doesn’t contain every letter in the alphabet, but what’s important is that it contains the letter u more often than usual—nine times in 40 characters (or nine words). According to a study by Professor Barry Keating, the letter u makes up 3.6308% of all English words, meaning that in a set of 40 random characters, it’s more likely to show up only once or twice.

Of course, there’s a lot of statistical variation in language, so just putting three or four u’s into the sentence might not be enough to feel unusual. Here’s a pair of sentences from earlier in this same post…

The rules aren’t as firm for a plutogram as they are for a lipogram. If the “rule” of a lipogram is “never use [certain letters]” or “only use [certain letters],” then the “rule” of a plutogram is “use [certain letters] a lot.”

These use the letter u eight times in 166 characters, when the statistical average for a passage of that size would be six. That’s a slight rise, but not significant enough to matter.

Plutograms can also be more concerned with beginning letters. The classic alliterative sentence Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers counts as a plutogram. So would a longer passage with a lower percentage of p-words, as long as the overall number of p-words was still high enough to feel out of the ordinary.

I talk about how plutograms feel because even word lovers don’t often pore through the paragraphs they read for unusual points of letter frequency. But many phenomena can pop into our preconscious awareness as we perceive art, and just as lipograms can take their artistic power from a pronounced absence, plutograms can take such power from a pronounced presence.

But what “power” is that, exactly? Or to put it another way, this is a cute idea, but what is it good for?

Next time out, I’ll discuss a few possible answers to that question—including an old project of mine, and how I’m using plutograms to resurrect it.