Letter Banning: Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea

Course goal: To chuckle our way through Mark Dunn’s “Ella Minnow Pea,” aka LMNOP.  From the back cover, reviewers comment that this book is “a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere” and a “satire of human foibles and a light-stepping commentary on censorship and totalitarianism.” The trouble begins when the High Island Council forbids the use of the letter Z, then Q and then J. As the list of forbidden letters grows, the words excised from public and private communications also grow, leading to increased surveillance and harsh punishments. Young Ella is determined to defeat the restrictive bans and regain freedom of expression. The wordplay in the novel is delightful. After discussing the fictional absurdity of it all and considering connections to the real world, we will follow Dunn’s lead and practice our own wordsmithing skills, playing with figures of speech, coining new words and creating lipograms and pangrams. Speaking of pangrams, Dunn describes the novel with this example: “A quirky novel with pages of zany, jumbled lexicon.” Join other Osher members “on a merry romp” this summer.