Word: logomaniac
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...Latinate abstractions. Old Frisian or Old French oddments, fubsy eloquences of Middle English and exotic intrusions from the Arabic. It contains a million and a half quotations to show the historical progress of language, the way its vocabularies have stirred, matured in meaning and eventually decayed. But the logomaniac's great joy in the O.E.D. is to wander through it looking for the glint of old coins: sippet, maumetry, floscule, gimmer, the wonderfully dark deathbird and night...
This resolutely useless information is published in one of the year's most peculiar and fascinating books, an encyclopedia of logology assembled by a stark-raving logomaniac named Dmitri Alfred Borgmann, a Chicago actuary whose name, when its letters are transposed, spells "damn mad boring trifler." Boring he is not. Among his offerings...
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