When an editor complained that Gerald Kersh used too many long words, Kersh bet him £50 that he could write a story entirely in monosyllables. Kersh won:

We met on the stairs of Time: I was on my way up; he was on his way down. I was young; he was old, and poor — so poor that he did not know when luck would send him a meal and a bed.

Frederic Birmingham published the whole three-page story in his 1958 book The Writer’s Craft.