Here's the challenge: Write a story using only words from this list.

Here's the backstory: One area of computer science, information retrieval, deals with the comparison of documents, especially the identification of documents that are similar to each other. Imagine typing a query into a search engine, for example: conceptually (and approximately) you've created a tiny document containing the string of words you've typed, and you're asking for other documents on the Web that are most similar to yours. How should we measure similarity? One way is is to count the words that two documents have in common (along with other stuff I won't get into). But there are a lot of words that don't really contribute to similarity in a useful way. They're too common: words like "the" and "was" and "about" and "go" and so forth. These are called stop words. Many information retrieval systems filter out stop words before they make their comparisons between documents, to concentrate on the more meaningful similarities.

A couple of weeks ago I was involved in a Master's Examination in the area of information retrieval. During her presentation, the student showed us the list of stop words she'd used in her work. A friend (one of a few I wouldn't hesitate to call a genius) suggested that it would be interesting to write a story using only words from such a list. This was clever and funny--you could write a story and put it online, but trying to find it might be difficult if a search engine, by default, is ignoring all the words in the story.

If I had more creativity, energy, and time, I'd give you an example of such a story, but instead I'll punt and only offer the challenge.