The present, ever e-less

While wandering around the fascinating Fediverse I stumbled upon a wonderful community of people who communicate with each other without ever using the letter ‘e’. Or in Oulipo words: no fifth symbols if you want to talk in that Oulipo community. Find words without that gliph if you want to join. I joined right away.

Oulipo means Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, which means something like workshop for potential literature. Its practitioners write literature with restrictions. Such a restriction could be writing with only one vowel, like the title of this blog post. Or writing without one vowel, like the Oulipo Mastodon instance does. A wonderful example I read today is

it’s shockingly straightforward to find anagrams of “procrastination”.

In the past, in the nineties to be exact, when I was an art student, I made some oulipan art. I made sculptures with acrostic little stories in them: every next word in such a story starts with the next letter in the alphabet. Yes, all these stories had just 26 words. Here’s a Dutch example:

Alle beregoeie creatieven denken echt formidabele genialiteiten. Hoe iedereen jegens kunst leunt, metafoor natuurlijk, opent potentieel qua resultaat. Serieuze totstandkoming uiteindelijk, vergt wetenschap, xenologie, yver, zakelijkheid.

You can understand that I got excited when I found this Oulipo community. Stuff like this makes me extra creative. At first I thought about writing an acrostic story, but then I realised that it would be impossible to write the fifth word. The next idea was a bot that posts the time whenever it can be written in english without using the letter ‘e’. The problem with such a bot is that people live in different time zones. So instead of making a bot, I made a website which uses the time on your own computer.

Most of the time it says It is way past six o’clock, since every hour after six has an ‘e’ in it. But in the first hours after midnight and noon things are slightly less boring. Sometimes. It is by far the most boring clock I ever made. But it was surprisingly hard to do. The hard part was not writing the logic. The problem was that I tried to write the code for this clock in Oulipan fashion, without using the letter ‘e’. Which is impossible. In JavaScript it is impossible to write functionality for time without the ‘e’. And writing if else statements is, understanably, a bit more complicated with this constraint. And in HTML you really need an ‘e’ for some things, like styling things. So yes, the clock shows no fifth symbol, but the source code is not entirely without it. Every time I had to use that fifth glyph in the code I wrote an apology behind it.

If you know ways to improve this code please let me know.