Einsteinian Rule-Breakers

Salute THEIR WEIRDNESS.

I don’t know whether Xavier Balilinkinoff was a real person or not. Early Word Ways included a few contributors who were just aliases for its first two editors. But whoever he was, his last appearance in Word Ways—and anywhere else in the online historical record—is the piece “Onomancy.” “Onomancy” wanders between several topics, but its first is words that break the old spelling rule:

I before E except after C, or sounding like A, as in reigning or weigh.

Balilinkinoff was especially interested in words and phrases that violated the rule twice. In 2024, we can improve on his listings of those “high achievers.”

He noted that Einstein was a name (and also a word for “really smart person”) with two E-Is, and neither one sounded like “a” or followed a “c.” A similar case is film director Sergei Eisenstein. “Sergei” ends in a “a” sound, so Eisenstein is “only” a two-time rule-breaker. But more importantly, his name, like Einstein’s, has become part of the language. When film critics talk about a montage of short shots with varied subjects, they often call it Eisensteinian, in honor of Sergei’s pioneering work.

A few other famous names of European extraction have twin ei’s: science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, film mogul and notorious abuser Harvey Weinstein, and Polish chemist Tadeus Reichstein. (I think the “after c” rule only counts if the e and i come immediately after the c.)

In heiligenschein, a halo of light found around shadows on wet grass and near sunset, both ei’s have a long “i” sound. The same goes for the term weisenheimer, which signifies a smartass.

I think we can agree not to include phrases that involve a space between the “e” and the “i.” Otherwise, we’d have to count things like “the ‘i.’” Some familiar phrases might be of interest, though, like neither of theirs.

Combining ei’s and cie’s gives us eigencoefficients and eigenfrequencies, terms in scalar math, as well as Balilinkinoff’s term oneiromancies, magics performed with dreams. Phrases of interest include foreign currencies and foreign policies, the honorable title Their Excellencies, LA suburb Hacienda Heights, physics term coefficient of homogeneity, scientific atheism, and the movie/song title Weird Science.

Reaching a bit further, we can find the hyphenated term species-being, Karl Marx’s general concept of human nature. Neil Cicierega is a YouTube star, half of the team Lemon Demon, who produced “Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.” The Alzheimer’s Society is a self-explanatory advocacy group in the UK.

When it comes to doubling up cie’s, the primary source in English is variations on the words deficiencies, efficiencies, proficiencies, and sufficiencies, as Balilinkinoff discussed.

The phrases Einstein coefficients and protein deficiencies break the “i before e except after c…” rule three times! This appears to be an upper limit among natural phrases—although if we allowed crossover between words, we could stretch our imaginations a bit and picture the NSA talking about surveillance insufficiencies.

Next week I’ll be heading out to help with Marscon’s comedy music track in Minnesota and mulling a couple of long-term opportunities, so posting here might be light. There’ll be a post tomorrow for sure, though!