A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how--and whether--culture shapes language and language, culture.

Okrent tells the fascinating and highly entertaining history of man's enduring quest to build a better language. Peopled with charming eccentrics and exasperating megalomaniacs, the land of invented languages is a place where you can recite the Lord's Prayer in John Wilkins's Philosophical Language, say your wedding vows in Loglan, and read "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" in Lojban -- not to mention Babm, Blissymbolics, and the nearly nine hundred...

"In Atlas of the Heart, Brown takes us on a journey through 85 of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human. As she maps the necessary skills and lays out an actionable framework for meaningful connection, she gives us the language and tools to access a universe of new choices and second chances - a universe where we can share and steward the stories of our bravest and most heartbreaking moments with one another in a way that...

Infants and toddlers can use sign language well before they can speak, offering an exciting opportunity for the two of you to communicate in deeper and more complete ways. Start things off with baby sign language essentials--like "eat," "more," and "all done"--then move on to more complex ideas--like different foods, the outside world, opposites, and emotions.

"Smart as hell and funny as fuck, this book explains why we can't stop swearing and what it tells us about our language and brains. Everyone swears. Only the rare individual can avoid ever letting slip an expletive. And yet, we ban the words from television and insist that polite people excise them from their vocabularies. That's a fucking shame. Not only is swearing colorful, fun, and often powerfully apt, as linguist and cognitive scientist Benjamin...

"Daisy Johnson's debut novel turns classical myth on its head and takes readers to a modern-day England unfamiliar to most. As daring as it is moving, Everything Under is a story of family and identity, of fate, language, love and belonging that leaves you unsettled and unstrung"--

A charming and indispensable tour of two thousand years of the written word, Shady Characters weaves a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and typography. Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger (†)-which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early Bible-or the at sign (@), which languished in obscurity for centuries until rescued by the Internet, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to...

"'Free speech' always has been limited by obstacles: national, state, or local laws, organizational rules, social restrictions, incomplete transmission via technology, and the limits of language itself. Now, with the advent of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and YouTube, a new era has emerged, and free speech has exploded. Never before have we enjoyed such free and diverse access to information, or more freedom to...