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

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

1841 | Equatorial Guinea

Drum Circle

The talking drums of West Africa.More

213 BC | Qin

Spring Cleaning

Ignorance is strength in the Qin dynasty.More

Charts & Graphs

On the Record

First usages of words according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

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American author and educator Helen Keller.

English writer and essayist William Hazlitt.

German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Color photograph of Oliver Sacks with a white beard and glasses.

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

Color portrait of German theologian and reformer Martin Luther.

Russian author Viktor Pelevin.

It is a luxury to be understood.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1831

Portrait of Francis Bacon in sixteenth-century armor.

Missing contributor image silhouette

Francis Bacon & Joan Didion

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