Can you spot the patterns in each of these strange sentences?

Savor this unusual column, which contains this paragraph you now look upon. How quickly can you find out what is so uncommon about it? It looks so ordinary that you may think nothing is odd about it until you match it with most paragraphs that go on for this long. If you — smart as a whip and sharp as a tack — try your hand, strain your brain, and put your mind to work studying it, you will find out. Do not solicit any additional coaching; nobody may assist you. Try your colossal skill at figuring it out and coming up with a solution. Finish this task and you’ll wind up happy as a clam and a lark. Good luck! I’m truly rooting for you!

The answer is that the paragraph you have just read contains not a single “e” — the most frequently occurring letter in our alphabet. Such passages are called lipograms.

Now that you get the idea, use your mind to figure out what is unusual about each of the following sentences.

1. When you speak and write, there is no law that says you have to use big words. Short words are as good as long ones, and short, old words, like sun and grass and home, are best of all. A lot of small words. more than you might think, can meet your needs with a strength, grace, and charm that large words do not have.
2. A big cuddly dog emitted fierce growls, happily ignoring joyful kids licking minute nodes on pretty, queer, rotten, smelly toadstools underneath vampires who x-rayed young zombies.
3. I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.
4. Elk City, Kansas, is a snaky tickle.
5. Hears sum rye, humerus pros eye rote won idol sundae mourning our discreetly four nun butt deer auld ewe.
6. Feigning proficient weird science, foreign neighbor Keith Einstein, seeing eight beige, kaleidoscopically veined weightlifters, seized feisty caffeine protein reinforcement.
7. Good housekeepers vacuum skiing bazaars.
8. Early legendary armies assault gutsy ribald hippies’ lipomas.
9. Cowardly, catastrophic dogmas battle apex-rated, emulated, pigmented antagonists.
10. Mr. Jock, TV quiz Ph.D., bags few lynx.
11. Unsociable housemaid unnoticeably discourages facetious behaviour.
12. Discounter introduces reductions.
13. IMAIM NI IXAT A TIH AHTAWAIH OTUA TAHT HTIW

Answers

1. Every word is a single syllable.
2. The first letter of each word progresses alphabetically.
3. Each word gets longer by one letter.
4. This is a palindrome — a sentence that reads the same forward and backward. (Fyi, there really is an Elk City in Kansas.)
5. Every word in this sentence is a homophone, a word that sounds like another word but is spelled differently. Hence, the sentence looks like gibberish but, if read aloud, makes perfect sense.

6. Each word violates the “i-before-e, except after c” rule of spelling.
7. Each of the five words contains a different double vowel..
8. Each word begins with a three-letter name of a body part.
9. Each word begins with a three-letter name of a member of the animal kingdom.
10. Each letter of the alphabet occurs but once in this 26-letter statement. This design is called a pangram.
11. Each word contains the major vowels, a-e-i-o-u, in a different order.
12. Each 10-letter word contains the same letters. That is, each is an anagram of the other two.
13. Because every capital letter in this statement features left-right symmetry, this sentence reads just fine if you look at it in a mirror or read it backwards. The sentence also preserves the trochaic meter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Song of Hiawatha.”

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To gather a sense of the effects that Chat GPT may exert on human writing, some have asked AI (Artificial Intelligence) itself. Here’s a response straight from the source’s mouth:

“As an AI model myself, AI can be a helpful tool for writers, such as aiding in research or generating ideas, but it cannot completely replace the human touch. Writing is not just about coming up with words to fill up a page. It’s about communicating ideas and emotions effectively to connect with your audience. In short, AI may change the writing process, but it does not mean the end of it. It might even provide new opportunities for creativity and innovation in the writing industry.”