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.

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

Using symbolically coded messages hidden in beer barrels, Catholic conspirators communicated with the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots, about a plan to kill Elizabeth I. Francis Walsingham, the queen’s spymaster, obtained a message, employed a codebreaker, and found evidence that Mary approved of the assassination. She was beheaded for treason in 1587.