Anyone know which story these terms appear in? Appreciate any reply..

These replies come by way of the Booksleuth Forums at Abebooks:

From:� jent
There was an Irngl (plus another with an odd name) kind of little kobolds who twisted T.V. antennas on rooftops for fun, before collecting humans. Would have to hunt it up though.
Jen in Melbourne

From:� wayrad

Copied from the "About" page at irtnog.org:

What's in a name?

The letters "IRTNOG" come from a Ray Bradbury story, where people stopped reading books and started reading digests instead, and then digests of digests, and then super digests where a 500-page novel was cramed into a few short paragraphs. Finally, some enterprising linguist devised a mathematical formula that would condense the entire intellectual and emotional impact of a book into a single word. It spit out the word "IRTNOG" when he ran a Hemingway novel through it. Of course, by this point in time, no one was reading real books, so when books were banned (e.g. for offensive content), no one complained...

Okay, this one is beginning to sound like a real Ray Bradbury story! It can't be "Fahrenheit 451"--too many people who read the Bradbury boards have read that and would have recognized it--but he did write other censorship tales including short stories. This one sounds very much like a Bradbury concept influenced by Orwell. If anyone can identify it, we can move it from the "attributed to Bradbury" to the "by Bradbury" list.

This reply came from Robert Carnegie by way of the newsgroups rec.arts.books.childrens and rec.arts.sf.written.

Is _A Clockwork Orange_ eliminated?

Likewise _1984_?

Do the terms exist in a real language?

This reply came from libraryladytoo by way of the Abebooks Booksleuth Forums.

I found a reference to "a parable called 'Irtnog'" by E. B. White, in which he "reflects with surprising ambivalence on the condensation of books into digests and digests into meaningless code words...."� Using amazon.com's Search Inside This Book feature, I found this in Jennifer Ham's book Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, page 206.� The reference cites White's Quo Vadimus? or the Case for the Bicycle (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), 49.

Cathy

Thanks! Looks like a solve! This one, at least, I can honestly see how it could be mistaken for a Bradbury story.

Cori