Communication

Volume V, Number 2 | spring 2012

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Preamble

Word Order

By Lewis H. Lapham

The Internet is blessed with undoubtedly miraculous applications, but language is not yet one of them. Technology cannot displace the primacy of words.

Dictionary of American Regional English fieldworkers with Frederic G. Cassidy.

Essay

Native Tongues

By Simon Winchester

The making of the Dictionary of American Regional English, a five-thousand-page, five-volume book documenting the history of American slang.

Map

Living Languages

Facts and figures on the languages of the world.

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Miscellany

The so-called Wicked Bible, published in 1631, accidentally printed the Seventh Commandment as “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The printer, Robert Barker, was fined three hundred pounds.

Voices In Time

1821 | Pisa

The Imperial Faculty

Percy Bysshe Shelley on language and the imagination.More

Voices In Time

1855 | Portugal

Broken English

Hopelessly lost in translation with Pedro Carolino.More

Voices In Time

1871 | Oxford

Close Reading

Through the looking-glass with Lewis Carroll.More

Charts & Graphs

Font of History

The origins of famous typefaces.

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Black and white photograph of German writer Hermann Hesse.

English writer and essayist William Hazlitt.

Black and white photograph of a young H.G. Wells with a mustache.

Political consultant and media advisor Mandy Grunwald.

Contributors

Cherokee leader and newspaper editor Elias Boudinot.

Black and white photograph of American poet Marianne Moore.

Black and white photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with a huge mustache.

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

—Alfred Hitchcock, 1962