Six Tuscan Poets, by Giorgio Vasari, 1544.

Six Tuscan Poets, by Giorgio Vasari, 1544. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota.

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.

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

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.

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Map

Living Languages

Facts and figures on the languages of the world.

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Miscellany

There are sixty-eight indigenous languages in Mexico, one of which, Ayapaneco, as of 2011, had only two known speakers—and they prefer not to speak with one another.

1961 | Washington, DC

Breaking the Bad News

Television’s vast wasteland.More

c. 1887 | Tuscumbia, AL

What Is Love?

Helen Keller seeks understanding of the inexpressible.More

1915 | Congers, NY

Turn On, Tune In

The great and growing army of wireless boys.More

Charts & Graphs

On the Record

First usages of words according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

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Belgian Symbolist poet, playwright, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck.

Portrait of Swiss-born philosopher, writer, and political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Black and white photograph of a young Marshall McLuhan with a think mustache.

Black power leader H. Rap Brown.

Photograph of Vladimir Nabokov

Linguist, lexicographer, columnist, and editor Ben Zimmer.

American newspaper commentator and author Walter Lippmann.

The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.

—Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1858

St. Benedict

Belgian Symbolist poet, playwright, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck.

Saint Benedict & Maurice Maeterlinck

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