Word: borgmann
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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BEYOND LANGUAGE by Dmitri A. Borgmann. 338 pages. Scr/bner...
This is a book for the tired scientist, mathematician or logician. But the word games that Dmitri Borgmann has collected for his trip into the secret world beyond language also can be played by the ordinary reader, particularly if he is a genius...
...Borgmann, a Chicago actuary, displayed his linguistic passion in an earlier book, Language on Vacation (TIME, Sept. 17, 1965). He likes to dream up puzzles based on Q words, paradoxes, homonyms, palindromes, anagrams, acronyms and acrostics, all of which require something more than a smidgin of esoteric knowledge. Explain this, he commands reading the same backward as forward - it is the short title of a dramat ic monologue, written in the late 1800s by a Portuguese eccentric named Baptista Machado...
...take a Borgmann favorite, the etymological redundancy - ouija, for example, which consists of the French oin and the German ja, both meaning yes. What about a quadruple redundancy? For a hint, Borgmann aims his reader toward southwest England. After a few dutiful hours of brain racking, it is permissible to turn to the answers in the back of the book. In The Story of English, writes Borgmann, Mario Pei mentions a ridge near Plymouth called Torpenhow Hill. "This name consists of the Saxon tor, the Celtic pen, the Scandinavian haugr (later transformed into how) and the Middle English hill...
...nine prepositions ("What did you bring the book that I do not wish to be read on to out of up from Down Under for?"). He will also be given the correct term for a 1 28th note in music (quasihemidemisemiquaver, or semi-hemidemisemiquaver). Good sport that he is, Borgmann asks his fans for suggestions. How about this: What is the significance of this series: 8, 14, 23, 28, 34, 42, 49, 57? Hint: any straphanger on the New York BMT subway can see the answer pass before his eyes...