bond villain or master linguist?

the duck face may have replaced the sneer as the ultimate facial expression in formal portraiture, but this still doesn’t really clue us into whether or not this disgusted genius and his evil lap cat are planning to hold the world hostage for one hundred billion dollars or thinking about how to make sense of the odd little glyphs found inscribed in mayan stonework. so i will just tell you.

yuri knorozov is the russian ethnographer and linguist who first deciphered maya script. here’s how it all began »

At the closing stages of the war in May 1945, Knorozov and his unit supported the push of the Red Army vanguard into Berlin. It was here…[that] Knorozov came across the National Library while it was ablaze. Somehow Knorozov managed to retrieve from the burning library a book, which remarkably enough turned out to be a rare edition containing reproductions of the three Maya codices which were then known…Knorozov is said to have taken this book back with him to Moscow at the end of the war, where its examination would form the basis for his later pioneering research into the Maya script.

there are many bamfs in linguistics but for my one hundred billion dollars, knorozov is the bamfiest bamf of them all.