   Normally the character of an academic is of marginal relevance to his or her work. In the case of Leśniewski there is reason to think otherwise. The extreme rigor that he applied in logic, the unflinchingly high standards he set himself and others, his blank incomprehension of intellectual, formal and linguistic inexactness, and his willingness to let academic disagreement sour his relationships with colleagues, all speak of an unusual rigidity. This seems to have been deeply anchored: of his school days we know little other than that he was intolerant of exceptions to any rule, whether or not the rule was sensible. After one of his early Polish essays was typeset with a spelling mistake in the title (‘środku’ instead of ‘środka’), he always quoted the incorrect title, because to correct it would have been to break the rule that quotation must be literal and exact. In his early years he nursed the project of translating Anton Marty’s rambling and polemical 1908 treatise Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie [Investigations on the Founding of General Grammar and Philosophy of Language]. He never got beyond the second word of the title, ‘zur’, which is admittedly not easily captured in all its nuances—it can mean ‘toward’ as well as ‘on’ or ‘about’. Having carried a copy of the book around for some time and asked all his friends and colleagues how they would translate ‘zur’, he gave up. No doubt his interests shifted, but the incident demonstrates both his punctiliousness and his inflexibility.