''Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities'' is a 1965 book written by

Dmitri Borgmann Dmitri Alfred Borgmann (October 22, 1927 – December 7, 1985) was a German-American author best known for his work in recreational linguistics. Early life Borgmann was born on October 22, 1927, in Berlin, Germany, to Hans and Lisa Borgmann. F ...

Content

Borgmann introduces his book by stating that he hopes it will "elevate recreational linguistics to the same high level of esteem now enjoyed by

recreational mathematics Recreational mathematics is mathematics carried out for recreation (entertainment) rather than as a strictly research-and-application-based professional activity or as a part of a student's formal education. Although it is not necessarily limited ...

" and will cultivate in the reader an awareness of the beauty of words. Chapter by chapter, the book goes on to describe and provide examples of long-established forms of letter-play, such as

palindrome A palindrome (Help:IPA/English, /ˈpæl.ɪn.droʊm/) is a word, palindromic number, number, phrase, or other sequence of symbols that reads the same backwards as forwards, such as ''madam'' or ''racecar'', the date "Twosday, 02/02/2020" and th ...

s and reversals, antigrams,

anagram An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word ''anagram'' itself can be rearranged into the phrase "nag a ram"; which ...

pangram A pangram or holoalphabetic sentence is a sentence using every letter of a given alphabet at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and typing. Origins The best-k ...

s, transpositions, and

word square A word square is a type of acrostic. It consists of a set of words written out in a square grid, such that the same words can be read both horizontally and vertically. The number of words, which is equal to the number of letters in each word, is k ...

s. Also included are chapters on word-level phenomena, such as sentence palindromes, and wordplay involving

arithmetic Arithmetic is an elementary branch of mathematics that deals with numerical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In a wider sense, it also includes exponentiation, extraction of roots, and taking logarithms. ...

and

geometric progression A geometric progression, also known as a geometric sequence, is a mathematical sequence of non-zero numbers where each term after the first is found by multiplying the previous one by a fixed number called the ''common ratio''. For example, the s ...

Piphilology Piphilology comprises the creation and use of mnemonic techniques to remember many digits of the mathematical constant . The word is a play on the word "pi" itself and of the linguistic field of philology. There are many ways to memorize , inclu ...

and various methods of encoding the digits of pi into word

mnemonics A mnemonic device ( ), memory trick or memory device is any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval in the human memory, often by associating the information with something that is easier to remember. It makes use of e ...

are also discussed.

Reception and legacy

On publication the book attracted favourable reviews, with ''

Time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

'' calling it "one of the year's most peculiar and fascinating books", ''

Kirkus Reviews ''Kirkus Reviews'' is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus. The magazine's publisher, Kirkus Media, is headquartered in New York City. ''Kirkus Reviews'' confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fiction, no ...

'' summarizing it as "intellectual busy work which is fine entertainment", and ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it, with more than 150 Nobel Pri ...

'''s James R. Newman's lauding it as "the best, most comprehensive book ever written on… recreational linguistics". Later writers have come to regard the book as "groundbreaking", noting that it was the first book devoted solely to the description and study of wordplay, rather than simply providing a list of puzzles. The book is notable for having introduced and popularized the use of the word '' logology'' to mean recreational linguistics, or the study and practice of

wordplay Word play or wordplay (also: play-on-words) is a literary technique and a form of wit in which words used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement. Examples of word play include puns, phone ...

. Borgmann has since been referred to as the "Father of Logology" and his book is credited with ushering in a "golden age of wordplay". The book's publicity led to Borgmann being contracted by industrial design firm Loewy & Snaith to invent brand names for its client

Standard Oil Standard Oil Company was a Trust (business), corporate trust in the petroleum industry that existed from 1882 to 1911. The origins of the trust lay in the operations of the Standard Oil of Ohio, Standard Oil Company (Ohio), which had been founde ...

, and to

Greenwood Periodicals Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. (GPG) was an educational and academic publisher (middle school through university level) which was part of ABC-Clio. Since 2021, ABC-Clio and its suite of imprints, including GPG, are collectively imprints of B ...

selecting him to establish and edit their logology journal, ''

Word Ways ''Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics'' is a quarterly magazine on recreational linguistics, logology and word play. It was established by Dmitri Borgmann in 1968 at the behest of Martin Gardner. Howard Bergerson took over as e ...

''.

Production history

''Language on Vacation'' was published in 1965 by

Charles Scribner's Sons Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner's or Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City that has published several notable American authors, including Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Marjori ...

; recreational mathematician Joseph Madachy served as the author's

literary agent A literary agent is an agent who represents writers and their written works to publishers, theatrical producers, film producers, and film studios, and assists in sale and deal negotiation. Literary agents most often represent novelists, screenwr ...

. The book went through at least two printings, but as of 2005 it was out of print. The manuscript Borgmann originally submitted contained two additional chapters, on word play involving

phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

s and

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

s, which were rejected by the publisher. Some of this material was recycled for Borgmann's second book, '' Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought'', and other topics were worked into ''Word Ways'' articles.

References

{{reflist, 30em, refs= {{cite journal , author-link=A. Ross Eckler, Jr. , last=Eckler, Jr. , first=A. Ross , date=February 2013 , title=Damn mad boring trifler? , url=http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol46/iss1/16/ , journal= Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics , volume=46 , issue=1 , pages=35–42 {{cite magazine , date=September 17, 1965 , title=Word salad , url=http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,842150,00.html , magazine=

TIME Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

, volume=86 , issue=12 , pages=139 {{cite journal , date=August 19, 1965 , title=Language on Vacation , url=https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dmitri-a-borgmann/language-on-vacation/ , journal=

{{cite book , author-link=Yakov Malkiel , last=Malkiel , first=Yakov , date=1968 , title=Essays on Linguistic Themes , url=https://archive.org/details/essaysonlinguist0000malk, url-access=registration , publisher=University of California Press , pag
392
{{cite journal , author-link=A. Ross Eckler, Jr. , last=Eckler, Jr. , first=A. Ross , date=November 2005 , title=The Borgmann Apocrypha , url=http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol38/iss4/4/ , journal= Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics , volume=38 , issue=4 , pages=258–260 {{cite journal , author-link=A. Ross Eckler, Jr. , last=Eckler, Jr. , first=A. Ross , date=February 1985 , title=Dmitri Borgmann, Father of Logology , url=http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol18/iss1/2/ , journal= Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics , volume=18 , issue=1 , pages=3–5 {{cite news , author=Phil Baechler , title=Word Play: Meet the man who named 'Exxon'. , url= https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314&dat=19800407&id=pvtLAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Qu4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=6622,2969761, newspaper=

The Spokesman-Review ''The Spokesman-Review'' is a daily broadsheet newspaper based in Spokane, Washington, the city's sole remaining daily publication. It has the third-highest readership among daily newspapers in the state, with most of its readership base in ...

, date=April 7, 1980 , pages=6–7 , access-date=October 22, 2014 {{cite journal , last=Newman , first=James R. , author-link=James R. Newman , date=December 1965 , title=Books , journal=

, volume=213 , issue= 6, pages=114–121 , doi=10.1038/scientificamerican1265-114 , bibcode=1965SciAm.213f.114N {{cite book , author-link=Dave Morice , last=Morice , first=Dave , date=2001 , title=The Dictionary of Wordplay , publisher=Teachers & Writers Collaborative , isbn=978-0-915924974 {{cite book , author-link=Rod L. Evans , last=Evans , first=Rod L. , date=June 2012 , title=Tyrannosaurus Lex: The Marvelous Book of Palindromes, Anagrams, and Other Delightful and Outrageous Wordplay , location=New York, NY, USA , publisher=Penguin , isbn=978-1-101-58863-5 {{cite encyclopedia , last1=Johnson , first1=Dale D. , last2=von Hoff Johnson , first2=Bonnie , last3=Schlichting , first3=Kathleen , editor1-last=Baumann , editor1-first=James F. , editor2-last=Kame'enui , editor2-first=Edward J. , encyclopedia=Vocabulary Instruction: Research to Practice , title=Logology: Word and language play , year=2004 , publisher=Guildford Press , isbn=1-57230-933-4 , pages=180 {{cite journal , author=Scot Morris , date=October 1986 , title=Games , url=https://archive.org/details/omni-magazine-1986-10 , journal= OMNI , volume=9 , issue=1 , pages=182–183 American non-fiction books 1965 non-fiction books Palindromes Word play Charles Scribner's Sons books