Headscratchers / The Imitation Game

• Commander Denniston says that he had rejected "the best linguist in Britain, who knows German better than Bertold Brecht". Any ideas on who he means?
  • Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright, librettist of The Threepenny Opera and others.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien?
• How the heck do you get "Mingas", out of Menzies?
  • The same way one gets "Mannering" out of Mainwaring, "Chumley" out of Cholmondley, and - I kid you not - "Fanshaw" out of Featherstonehaugh. Britain's more aristocratic families seem to have made something of a running gag out of having as large a disconnect as possible between spelling and pronunciation. Specifically regarding Menzies, the name came from Norman French (Mesnieres), and morphed into its current spelling and pronunciation as the name of a Scottish Clan. They don't need the spelling to make sense; they have a castle.
  • Menzies is a Scottish name. the "Z" is actually a replacement of a letter present in the scots alphabet "ȝ" which has that g sound. It's a common thing when going from old Gaelic names to English ones.
• The other people on the team are perplexed by Turing's antisocial and confused behavior, as if they themselves have never met a genius before - when they're probably geniuses themselves. They aren't seen going over Turing's work which any genius would do, at least seeing if such a machine was possible. The movie drops some serious Drama Ball there, so the Lowest Common Denominator doesn't feel left out.
  • Yep. One of the movie's many flaws is implying that the people at Bletchley Park did absolutely nothing until Turing came on board.
• Why was the Enigma decoding so vital?
  • In the First World War the Battle of the Atlantic was won by the introduction of the convoy system (grouping merchant ships together and escorting them with small warships) and the depth charge (underwater bombs which could destroy submerged German submarines). In the Second World War the Allies adopted the same tactics but this was undermined by the fall of France/Norway and the neutrality of the Irish Free State (the latter estimated to have cost over 300 ships and 5000 lives in addition to the knock on effect of the loss of their cargoes to the overall Allied war effort). Enigma allowed the Allied navies to route their convoys around enemy U-boats, allowing them to limit losses to an acceptable degree.