Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

In article
<74bf9f5e-be07-4994-9873-90f58e2fa633@x1g2000prh.googlegroups.com>,

It might be a bit of a stretch but something that James May did might
almost qualify.

Go to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_May> then click on the
AutoCar image to enlarge it.

I too would like to know if there is a name for this.   I don't know
one.

Nowhere near as long as your example, on my mother's gravestone, I
quoted two verses from the Jewish Bible which had her first and middle
name resptively embedded in them.  Hebrew doesn't have capital
letters, so I used a somewhat bigger font in order for the letters to
show.  I got the idea from a tombstone I saw in one of the Jewish
cemeteries around here.  

The stone cutters, not Jewish, did a wonderful job even in Hebrew.  In
one case, the neck of one letter, a lamed, in the rest of the
sentence, stuck up above the rest of the text and could have been
confused with, been seen as just as big as, the three letters of my
mother's first name which also stuck up above the rest of the text.
So I looked in books until I found a lamed with its neck bent over,
used when space between lines of text is a problem. I Xeroxed that and
sent it to the monument company which put it in its set of templates
of Hebrew letters, and used it on my mother's stone.  It looked
perfect.  

(BTW, stone cutters in the monument business don't use hammers and
chisels anymore.  They use computers to make a drawing and then the
computer controls the pencil-point sand blaster that cuts the stone.)

Her names are each only 3 letters long, but it was also necessary to
find sentences that were fitting.  

(It's common, not on gravesstones but in poetry and songs to spell out
words with the first letter of each sentence, but that's a lot easier,
would have taken much more space, and would have drawn too much
attention from the rest of the stone.)  

When the first letter, syllable, or word of each line, etc. spell out
something, it's called an acrostic.

Hmmm. The wiki entry for acrostic calls it a form of constrained
writing.  Check out that entry.  And indeed, what you and I have done
would fit the definition for that.  But I don't see a more specific
name among those lited.

Also check out the Oulipo group and the Outrapo group.  I think we
would be welcome in the first of them.  You, at least.  I don't plan
to do anymore tombstones.

On May 13, 3:56�am, eloise.jer...@gmail.com wrote:

I can't point you in the right direction, but I thought both of the
sentences were lovely.