Conference thebay::joyoflex

567.0. "Unusual paragraph puzzle" by PAMOLA::RECKARD (Jon Reckard, 381-0878, ZKO3-2/T63) Thu Oct 06 1988 14:14

                     This is tough!

        How quickly can you find out what is so
    unusual about this paragraph?  It looks so
    ordinary that you would think that nothing
    at all was wrong with it, and, in fact, nothing
    is.  But it is UNUSUAL.  Why?  If you study it
    you may find out, but I'm not going to assist
    you in any way;  you must do it without
    coaching.  If you work at it for long, I think it
    will dawn on you, but who knows?  So go to
    work and try your skill.
                 (Par is about an hour.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The above is a ReWoP transcript (reprinted without permission, etc.) of a
paper I saw tacked to the wall by our copy machine.  I'll try to describe its
appearance.  (I hope the problem concerns the content and not the appearance.)
    The original uses a not-too-unusual font (after a quick scan of a Letraset
poster near me, I decided it looked like an upright "Le Griffe" or an informal,
less ornate "Agincourt" or "Old English").  Its large and bold type size pretty
much fills, and is centered on, the 8�x11 page.  "This is tough!" is underlined.
I duplicated the number of lines and the words per line.  It has a ragged(?)
right margin.  It has one space after full punctuation stops (whatever happened
to two spaces?).

    Does anyone see its unusual-ness?  Has anyone seen a copy of the original?
(I give up.)

Are we supposed to post answers/guesses here?  I think I know the answer.  For 
a hint, press <Return>

Hint:

	etaoin shrdlu

For the answer, press <Return>


There are no e's in the paragraph.  `E' is the most commonly used letter in 
the English language, by a wide margin.

Clay


     Reply .1 got it.  I once read of someone who wrote (or at
     least started work on) a series of 26 books, each of which
     did not use one of the letters of the alphabet.  He claimed
     that doing the "e" book was a horrible torture.
     
     Dan 

    An hour?  Would you believe 15 seconds?  
    
    Really, considering the setting (a conference on language) and
    the setup ("his is tough" and the fact that it's a language
    puzzle posed to language lovers, I'm surprised there was a 19
    minute gap between the posting of the original question and the
    first (correct) answer.
                
    Besides, it's a common puzzle.  By the time an alert reader gets
    to the third line, the answer becomes obvious.
    
    					andrew

    Yeah. It took me longer to verify my immediate conjecture (no ees) than
    it did to come up with the conjecture. I have seen similar paragraphs
    before.