The Whirl Of Words

Why do word puzzles fascinate us? How do they help develop problem-solving skills? How do they teach us about geography, literature, sports, and popular culture? How are they an international language? Jonathan Berkowitz offers a brief history of wordplay, with insights into puzzles and the brain. He offers tips on how to solve puzzles and explains the educational value of puzzles. Challenges in the form of rebuses, anagrams, codes and cryptograms, crosswords, and wordplay with numbers supply even more fun! The Whirl of Words is a unique, rich, and intriguing tour of a wide variety of word puzzles certain to stimulate a brain work-out.

Why do word puzzles fascinate us? How do they help develop problem-solving skills? How do they teach us about geography, literature, sports, and popular culture? How are they an international language? Jonathan Berkowitz offers a brief history of wordplay, with insights into puzzles and the brain. He offers tips on how to solve puzzles and explains the educational value of puzzles. Challenges in the form of rebuses, anagrams, codes and cryptograms, crosswords, and wordplay with numbers supply even more fun! The Whirl of Words is a unique, rich, and intriguing tour of a wide variety of word puzzles certain to stimulate a brain work-out.

Tales from the Word Guy is a collection of essays adapted from the author’s segments on CBC Radio One’s North by Northwest. Jonathan Berkowitz takes the reader on a delightful journey through the history, idiosyncrasies, and sheer pleasures of the English language. He covers how English evolved and expanded over the centuries. And he reminds us of long-forgotten aspects of how to use the language properly. You will chuckle at how it is used improperly, often with amusing results. With enthusiasm, humour, and plenty of infectious fun, Berkowitz offers up a deep appreciation for the beauty of our language. If you love our language, you’ll love this look at it.

This book is about the perils and pitfalls of the busy mind. Busyness not only challenges our mental and physical health; there are also the subliminal messages that come hidden within the concession to the demands of busyness. This book asks the reader to view the whirl going on in the world today as though it were a stage set, and you are the director as well as one of the actors in the drama. The stage set device is a way to get a fresh and, hopefully, a refreshing perspective on the whirligig merry-go-round that is the busy whirl happening on the world stage today. The movement of the book takes the reader from an unreflective absorption in the whirl of time to a standpoint of spacious clarity, a place that allows one to see clearly what is really going on.

...an extensive bibliography of Ogden's writings and commentaries on them which will prove useful not only to scholars of Ogden but to anyone interested in that productive period of intellectual inquiry following World War I...a comprehensive book on a fascinating, and neglected, figure in British modernist intellectual life.