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Pride & Prejudice author Jane Austen stars in a new video game called “Word Fighter.” The video embedded above shows two characters from the game, J.D. “The Hero” (an orphan scholar) and Neil “The Rival” (an ivy league graduate student).

According to Pixels, Panels & Playthings, the game’s developers were influenced by Princess Peach Toadstool (from the Super Mario Bros. franchise). Jane “appears to be a very prim and proper lady … but when it’s time to throw down, she’s ready to destroy you.” The game will be available for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices.

Here’s more from the article: “Inspired by Boggle, Scrabble, Words With Friends and Super Puzzle Fighter, the object of the game is for players, as famous authors personified by their literary works, to spell words quickly on separate tile grids. The better the word — based on length and letter value — the more damage you do to your opponent. Special power-ups like attack multipliers and tile shufflers are added to the mix, so it can be anybody’s game.”

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The Oxford English Dictionary dates the phrase mind-boggling to 1955 and defines it to mean “overwhelming,” “startling” or “amazing.”

The word boggle however is a little older; 400 years older.

Originally it wasn’t people who were boggled but horses.

A boggled horse was a horse that had been spooked by something their drivers or riders couldn’t see.  The reason such a spooked horse was called boggled was because people were superstitious and they thought what might be spooking the horse might be a ghost or supernatural spirit.

These mythological beings went my many names including bogey-man and boggard, which was one of the breeds of little nasties in Harry Potter.

A related beast of superstition is the bugbear.  Now we think of a bugbear as something annoying, a thing that bugs you, but originally a bugbear was thought to be a supernatural creature in the form of a bear that specifically preyed on children.

That first 1955 usage of mind-boggling was by Erich Fromm in a book called The Sane Society.

He called American culture of the 1950s mind-bogglingly banal and stiflingly homogenous.

According to one review his recipe for success called for individual development and democratic self-expression within the context of a vibrant communal life, including relatedness; transcendence; rootedness; identity; and a framework of orientation and devotion.  Which itself sounds pretty supernatural and mind-boggling.