Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought
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| Author | Dmitri Borgmann |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Published | 1967 |
| Publisher | Charles Scribner's Sons |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 338 |
| OCLC | 655067975 |
| Preceded by | Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities |
Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought is a 1967 book written by Dmitri Borgmann.
Like Borgmann's first book, Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities, Beyond Language is a treatise on recreational linguistics, and indeed is based in part on material excised from early drafts of Language on Vacation. Unlike its predecessor, however, the main part of the book is presented as a series of 119 self-contained "Problems" with accompanying "Hints" and "Resolutions".
In many cases the problems are bona fide word puzzles, such as challenges to deduce orthograhic, phonetic, semantic, or etymological patterns in word lists, or to generate word lists of a given pattern. More often than not, however, the format is simply a conceit which enables the author to expound the results of his lexicographic and logological discoveries. For example, Problem 94 challenges the reader to trace the origin of the word FEAMYNG, a purported collective noun for ferrets. Borgmann's solution, which spans four pages, shows the term to be a ghost word; it was the result of a centuries-long chain of typographical errors (from BUSYNESS to BESYNESS to FESYNES to FESNYNG to FEAMYNG) propagated through various dictionaries. Problem 84 contains the earliest known example in print of the repetitive homonym "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo".
The book also contains a separate set of 18 "Bafflers"—short essays on logological problems for which Borgmann had no complete solution. Topics discussed here include kinship terms, color terms, word squares, letter bigrams, and the mysterious disc shown in Rembrandt's etching Faust in His Study.
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