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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Body Language

By Arika Okrent

When we form our thoughts into speech, some of it leaks through our gestures, revealing intricacies of language, ethnicity and assimilation.

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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.

1985 | Paris

To Keep the Word Alive

Writing under totalitarianism.More

c. 350 | Syria

Falling Off the Donkey

An unconventional grammar lesson.More

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.

Color engraving of Italian poet, scholar, and humanist Petrarch.

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

American newspaper commentator and author Walter Lippmann.

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

German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Pope Clement V.

American feminist, activist, and editor Gloria Steinem.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.

—Carl Sandburg, 1959

Portrait of Francis Bacon in sixteenth-century armor.

Missing contributor image silhouette

Francis Bacon & Joan Didion

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