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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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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Map

Living Languages

Facts and figures on the languages of the world.

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Miscellany

François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand complained late in life that he was going deaf. When someone mentioned the malady to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, he remarked, “He only thinks he is deaf because he can no longer hear anyone talking about him.”

1751 | Paris

Synesthesia

Denis Diderot on the senses, language, and aesthetics.More

c. 2800 BC | Uruk

One World, One Language

The pursuit of a universal tongue.More

1789 | Philadelphia

Proofreading

Benjamin Franklin promotes the proper usage of English.More

Charts & Graphs

Font of History

The origins of famous typefaces.

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Black and white photograph of E. B. White sitting at his typewriter with his dachshund.

Photograph of Vladimir Nabokov

Polish American writer and academic Eva Hoffman.

Historian and novelist Philipp Blom.

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

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

Language is the archives of history.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

St. Benedict

Belgian Symbolist poet, playwright, and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck.

Saint Benedict & Maurice Maeterlinck

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