Languages with free word orders pose daunting challenges to linguistic theory because they raise questions about the nature of grammatical strings. Ross, who coined the term Scrambling to refer to the relatively ‘free’ word orders found in Germanic languages (among others) notes that “… the problems involved in specifying exactly the subset of the strings which will be generated … are far too complicated for me to even mention here, let alone come to grips with” (1967:52). This book offers a radical re-analysis of middle field Scrambling.

IF YOU HAVE EVER FELT the paralyzing and strangling helplessness of hunting for the right word when you need it the most, then you know the real value of a rich vocabulary. There is no man on earth so alone as the one who is addressing a group of associates and, at the moment of putting across an "idea" which may make the future for him, finds himself struggling hopelessly for the right word to convey that idea. He is alone then ; there is no one who can help him, no matter how much we may wish to. He is alone with a mind that is struggling valiantly to broadcast the right word conveying the right idea.

Unless the right word is immediately available, the idea may as well have died at the very moment of conception. Remember there is more truth than poetry to the old jingle "... for want of a horseshoe nail a kingdom was lost." It is equally true that for the lack of a single word one's whole future may be lost.

This volume is a truly splendid collection of related vocabularies so arranged that the user can place his finger immediately upon the category of words that he needs for use or for study. To make these collections even more readily accessible for use and study, the collections of words have been divided vertically into groups. These are the major divisions for all words of verbs, adjectives, and nouns, the inverse order to the one by which we learned our wards as children, but the correct order in which we must learn our words as adults to improve and enrich our vocabularies.

Orson Scott Card has the distinction of having swept both the Hugo and Nebulaawards in two consecutive years with his amazing novels Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. For a body of work that ranges from science fiction to nonfiction to plays, Card has been recognized as an author who provides vivid, colorful glimpses between the world we know and worlds we can only imagine.
In a peaceful, prosperous African American neighborhood in Los Angeles, Mack Street is a mystery child who has somehow found a home. Discovered abandoned in an overgrown park, raised by a blunt-speaking single woman, Mack comes and goes from family to family–a boy who is at once surrounded by boisterous characters and deeply alone. But while Mack senses that he is different from most, and knows that he has strange powers, he cannot possibly understand how unusual he is until the day he sees, in a thin slice of space, a narrow house. Beyond it is a backyard–and an entryway into an extraordinary world stretching off into an exotic distance of geography, history, and magic.