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| AMGINE�S ENIGMA At the turn of the 17th century, Antoine Amgine, a French linguist living in England, was debating with colleagues how new words come into being. Amgine claimed he could introduce a new word into the English Language within 24 hours. When his bluff was called, he set out into the night armed with a box of wax pencils. Before dawn, Amgine had broken into 28 greengrocers� shops all over London, and, taking the letters of his name and reversing them, had written the word �enigma� on all the produce. During the night hundreds of fruits and vegetables were inscribed with the nonsense word and with a makeshift rubber stamp he printed the neologism on more than 1,000 eggs. By the morning the strange new word was on everyone�s lips, but nobody knew what it meant. Thus �enigma� became a byword for something inexplicable or puzzling. |
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