Book Review: Beyond Reality

Making the Alphabet Dance by Ross Eckler

St. Martin's Press, 297 pp., $23.95

In Back to Methuselah, Bernard Shaw imagined a time when our species would evolve into bodiless minds engaged in profound communication with one another. One wonders what people beyond sex, war, and economics would have to talk about. Perhaps Ross Eckler has the answer in Making the Alphabet Dance-- logology. The field could be described as linguistics without attention to meaning. British crossword puzzles employ twisted definitions to identify words employed in literate speech and writing, while American crosswords attempt difficulty by offering straightforward definitions of obscure words selected only because of the patterns of their letters. Friendly games of Scrabble are won by forming common words from letters chosen at random. Such play would not win in tournament Scrabble, where success requires memorization of all acceptable combinations, whether or not the players ever use the words or understand their meanings. Logolgists devote all the apparatus of science to words not as conveyors of meaning, but as interesting permutations of the English alphabet. Eckler is a mathematician, and there are similarities among number theory, sub-atomic physics, genetic taxonomy, and logology, but only the last seems absolutely devoid of practical value, which makes it a perfect subject for pure thought and discourse.

Poets are also concerned with words as words, but for the purpose of conveying meaning. Analysis of a Stephen Sondheim lyric, for example, reveals intricate manipulation of the language to fit rhymes to music, but in such a way that the result is as naturally transparent as ordinary speech, ultimately serving the context of a stage work. In logologists' play-- and they are playful-- the goal is not intelligibility. Wordplay has been found among the Greeks and Romans, and Shakespeare was an early English practitioner. Eckler quotes this passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

This acrostic in which the initial letters of the lines spell "Titania" would not have been recognized by London audiences hearing the words spoken by the actor playing Titania-- it was no more than Shakespeare's joke for later readers of the published text. (Eckler confirms with probability theory that the acrostic could not have appeared by chance.)

Acrostics are one subsection of Eckler's chapter on the branch of logistics dealing with obligatory combinations of letters. Another is the requirement in English that Q be followed by U. Scrabble players may wish to memorize Eckler's list of several dozen words in the unabridged Merriam-Webster that do not obey the rule. Another chapter deals with letter patterns, like the formal similarity of bamboo and excess in the locations of B and O and of E and S. Palindromes represent a familiar pattern-- Sue, dice do, to decide us. A less artificial palindrome is offered with a real place name-- Wassamassaw Swamp.

The longest chapter in Making the Alphabet Dance covers transformations, including the familiar anagrams and word chains in which one gets from one word to another through several intermediate words in which only one letter in the previous word is changed. More complex are word networks, in which transformations branch like a game of dominoes. Here Eckler provides a dense analysis of the probabilities of word location in such networks if the words are assigned values derived from the frequency of their appearance in written English. Numbers appear more amusingly in the chapter on number words, where Eckler deals with such constructions as This sentence contains five words. Here we are reminded that were it a word in the unabridged Merriam-Webster (2nd edition), eight hundred and twenty-two would appear on page 822.

Shortly after the appearance of modern computers, Arthur C. Clarke published a story called The Nine Billion Names of God. It dealt with a Tibetan lamasery where for centuries monks had been reciting combinations of letters, believing them to be the names of God. When all possibilities had been uttered, they believed, the world would end. In the story, the monks purchase a computer to accelerate the work, and after the salesman leaves the lamasery, he looks up to see, one by one, the stars going out. Those monks were logologists, of course, and computers have also been used to illuminate the nonfictional field. Much of the current research would not have been possible without computer analyses of lexicons and texts. I have mixed feelings about this development. A recent puzzle in Civilization magazine required twenty-one one-word anagrammatic transformations of combined pairs selected from forty-two other words. Hours of effort led me to only sixteen of the answers. Recourse to readily available computer programs would have produced all the correct answers in a few minutes-- but it wouldn't have been fun.

You may have correctly concluded by now that Making the Alphabet Dance is not light reading for the beach house. Logologists who read Word Ways, the quarterly journal that Ross Eckler edits with his wife Faith, will already have copies, and those who enjoy struggling with New York Times crosswords will find it irritatingly arcane. Among the rest of us, two categories may find time spent with it rewarding. Mathematicians will find entertainment in a new field employing the mental gymnastics of, say, braid theory, and solvers of British cryptics who are beginning to find them too easy will be led deeper into the esoteric regions of abstract recreation.