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.

Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia, by Jean-Joseph Taillasson, 1787.

Essay

Tape Delay

By Madeline Miller

How we misread Virgil for two thousand years, and what made it possible for a small group of scholars to figure it out.

Map

Living Languages

Facts and figures on the languages of the world.

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Miscellany

The so-called Wicked Bible, published in 1631, accidentally printed the Seventh Commandment as “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The printer, Robert Barker, was fined three hundred pounds.

Voices In Time

c. 1725 | Atlantic Ocean

Talking Book

An unquenchable thirst for knowledge.More

Voices In Time

c. 1190 BC | Argos

Instant Messaging

Clytemnestra receives word from the gods.More

Voices In Time

2011 | Cairo

To the Barricades

Tweeting a revolution.More

Charts & Graphs

Reform Movements

Successful attempts at linguistic overhaul.

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Cherokee leader and newspaper editor Elias Boudinot.

American poet, journalist, and essayist Walt Whitman.

American newspaper commentator and author Walter Lippmann.

Former chairman of the FCC Newton Minow.

Contributors

Portrait of Swiss-born philosopher, writer, and political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Linguist, lexicographer, columnist, and editor Ben Zimmer.

Portrait of English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

—Robert Burton, 1621