logomancy

Besides, anagrams seem to offer their enthusiasts an outlet for their shifty energies similar to the sort release that must be felt by numerologists: there is a kind of logomancy involved in anagrams.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XIII No 1 1986

Joshua (of Foolippic and Books Do Furnish A Room) has started Logomacy (Between logomachy and logomancy...) because:First: I wanted to play around with the Wordpress blogging software so that I can move away from the now moribund MovableType 2.6x

languagehat.com: LOGOMACY. 2004

Although many articles, theoretical essays, and books have been written about metaphors, little effort has been made to investigate them systematically: as all of language is itself a metaphor (unless one believes in logomancy), one is continually confronted in the compilation of an ordinary dictionary with examples of semantic and linguistic changes (as well as amelioration, pejoration, etc.) that are tantamount to shifts of meaning that, loosely, could be said to be metaphoric.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XIX No 3 1993

All this name changing is mere logomancy which neither changes the fact that there is something wrong with the afflicted nor, in the long run, our attitudes towards them.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XVIII No 1 1991

Were Barzun's logomancy to function, we could strike cancer from the language and everyone suffering from it would be instantly cured.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XIII No 3 1986

(and, one must assume, other media), still suffer from periodic attacks of puritan logomancy, while countries that have never made such a fuss over such matters appear to be surviving quite well, unsullied by pornography on TV and, in the case of Italy, unaffected by the election to Parliament of "La Cicciolina" (Ilona Staller), a star of pornographic films.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XIV No 4 1988