A Day At The You Knighted Nay Shuns (original) (raw)

It was a chilly afternoon on December the seventh, 1967, the 26th anni ersary of Pearl Harbour. Dmitri Borgmann was sitting in the reading room of the ew York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. He had come down from Oak Park, Illinois for a few days to do research on synonyms for baldness after noticing that his hairline was receding. For him the NYPL \ as a haven of so litude, an asylum which sheltered him from the madness of the sixtie. He was bro\\ ing through an original 1933 edition of Science and Sanity: An il/troduction to on-Ari totelian Systems and General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski. At page 26 he felt an 0 erpowering urg for some shuteye. Just as his head it the table he was tapped on the shoulder b a petit blond a red miniskirt. ' Mister Borgmann? Mister Dmitri Borgmann?' Dmitri grunted leepily. Was an overzealous librarian, he wondered, or an NYU sophomore wanting him to autograph her of his best-selling Language on Vacation? 'The Secretary General would like to meet with you straight awa. II II' lI""'(1 ill lI ' UII'li II " itll M' word containing n gative lett r Ii. h ul lh It h \ n. th • II, 1\1 1\' \II disastrous. 245 The limo pulled up outside the UN Secretariat building on First Avenue and they took the elevator up to the top floor. While Dmitri was waiting for U Thant in the reception area, Miss Spelling reappeared with a copy of Reader's Digest. 'U will be with you soon. You might like to do the word power test while you ' re waiting, Mister Borgnine. ' 'Borg-mann' he snapped. ' Borgnine is an Oscar-winning Hollywood actor and a well-mixed transposal of RINGBONE. Just call me Dmitri. ' ' Oh, you have the same first name as that famous musician, Dmitri Potemkin. ' Miss Spelling flounced off. Dmitri completed the word power test in a few seconds, then lapsed into one of his typical logo logical daydreams. He was intrigued by the initial U. Was U like M and Q in the James Bond movies a unisyllabic acronym designed to preserve the Secretary General's anonymity for security reasons? Or was U appointed because his given name was the same as the first letter of the UN itself? If that were so, the fOllller Burmese premier, the palindromic U Nu, would have been a more appropriate choice. Then he recalled that U was in fact a Burmese word for 'uncle'. Possibly all family relations in BUIOla were designated by an appropriate initial A for aunt, B for brother, C for cousin, D for daughter and so on. It occurred to him that this might be an ingenious method for mapping all family relationships in English nto a genealogical algebra such as AM for a maternal aunt, 3C2 a third cousin twice removed, S6S7 for the sixth son of a seventh son. This alphabetic schema could also be used for indexing other social groups like the British peerage A for archduke, B for baron, C for count, D for duke and so forth. Korzybski's notion of mapping the individuality of apples into apple I, apple2, etcetera, could also be applied to kinship. He made a mental note of this fascinating idea and resolved to pen an article about it as a contribution to a future issue of his new journal for recreational linguistics called Word Ways. An appellation jerked him out of his reverie. 'Dmitri Alfred Borgmann.' Dmitri turned around, half expecting to see Ralph Edwards from This is Your Life or someone resembling James Mason. Instead, he was confronted by a short bespectacled gentleman in a pinstriped suit. 'My name is U Thant. It's an honour to meet you, sir. Your reputation has preceded you .' Dmitri shook the Secretary General's outstretched hand. Not to do so might be considered non-U. 'How do you do, Mister Thant?' he said, with a reverential bow of the head.