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

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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Word for Word

By Ben Zimmer

Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus was the creation of an obsessive list-maker that became a tool and a temptation for generations of writers.

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Miscellany

Concluding that he and Bertrand Russell possessed irreconcilable “value judgments,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote Russell on March 3, 1914, to suggest that a continued correspondence could only be achieved by “restricting our relationship to the communication of facts capable of being established objectively, with perhaps also some mention of our friendly feelings for one another.”

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

—Thomas Hardy, 1874