English Language History

In 2003, the book Nigger started an intense conversation about the uses and implications of that epithet. The N Word moves beyond that short, provocative book by revealing how the word has both reflected and spread the scourge of bigotry in America.

Whether it's the distress of a bad haircut (AGE-OTORI) or longing for the food someone else is eating (GROAKING), the pleasure found in other people's happiness (CONFELICITY) or the shock of jumping into icy water (CURGLAFF), there are real words to pinpoint exactly how you feel and Susie Dent, Queen of Countdown's Dictionary Corner and lexicographer extraordinaire, is going to help you find them. Here are 1001 terms everyone needs, whether it's the best kind of hug (CWTCH), the relief found in swearing (LALOCHEZIA), or the ability to endure till the end (PERTOLERANCE).

Fifty thousand years ago - merely a blip in evolutionary time - our Homo sapiens ancestors were competing for existence with several other human species, just as their precursors had done for millions of years. Yet something about our species distinguished it from the pack, and ultimately led to its survival while the rest became extinct. Just what was it that allowed Homo sapiens to become masters of the planet? Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, takes us deep into the fossil record to uncover what made humans so special.

Managers want to know how to lead virtually, how to keep their teams motivated, and how to keep employees productive. Providing compelling, evidence-based answers to these issues, Remote Work Revolution is essential for navigating the enduring challenges teams and managers face. Filled with specific actionable steps and interactive tools, this timely book will help team members deliver results previously out of reach. Employees will be able to break through routine norms to successfully use remote work to benefit themselves, their groups, and ultimately their organizations.

In our ever-more-polarized society, there's at least one thing we still agree on: The world is overrun with misinformation, faulty logic, and the gullible followers who buy into it all. Of course, we're not among them - are we? Scientist David Robert Grimes is on a mission to expose the logical fallacies and cognitive biases that drive our discourse on a dizzying array of topics - from vaccination to abortion, 9/11 conspiracy theories to dictatorial doublespeak, astrology to alternative medicine, and wrongful convictions to racism.

Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense. Yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. His subject was the individual and his or her existence, the "existing being." In Kierkegaard's view, this purely subjective entity lay beyond the reach of reason, logic, philosophical systems, theology, or even "the pretenses of psychology." Nonetheless, it was the source of all these subjects. The branch of philosophy to which Kierkegaard gave birth has come to be known as existentialism.

This fresh and exciting approach to science, skepticism, and critical thinking will enlighten and inspire listeners of all ages. With a mix of wit and wisdom, it challenges everyone to think like a scientist, embrace the skeptical life, and improve their critical thinking skills. Think shows you how to better navigate through the maze of biases and traps that are standard features of every human brain.

These were among the questions that philosophers wrestled with in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a period shadowed by war and the rise of fascism. In response to these events, thinkers such as Philippa Foot (originator of the famous trolley problem), Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, and J. L. Austin aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language as a way of keeping philosophy true to everyday experience.

Bad English is sure to enlighten, enrage, and perhaps even inspire. Filled with historic and contemporary examples, the audiobook chronicles the long and entertaining history of language mistakes, and features some of our most common words and phrases, including decimate, hopefully, enormity, that vs. which, enervate vs. energize, bemuse vs. amuse, literally vs. figuratively, ain't, irregardless, socialist, OMG, and stupider.

Here, Cosimo proudly presents Book 2 of Ancient Egypt, in which Massey reads the prehistoric story of human civilization that can be studied in the language of ceremonial rites, ancient customs, and ritual dance, and consequently explores the resultant concept that religion evolved out of expressions of human fertility and sexuality–particularly as embodied in the primeval symbols of blood, sacrifice, and motherhood–and formed the first influences on Judeo-Christianity.

Here is the remarkable story of how this humble language took vigorous root in Eastern European shtetls and in the Jewish quarters of cities across Europe; how it achieved a rich literary flowering between the wars in Europe and America; how it was rejected by emancipated Jews; and how it fell victim to the Holocaust. And also how, in yet another twist of destiny, Yiddish today is becoming the darling of academia. Yiddish is a history as story; a tale of flesh-and-blood people with manic humor.

We all learn at least one language as children. But what does it take to learn six languages...or seventy? In Babel No More, Michael Erard, "a monolingual with benefits," sets out on a quest to meet language superlearners and make sense of their mental powers. On the way he uncovers the secrets of historical figures like Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who was said to speak seventy-two languages; Emil Krebs, a pugnacious German diplomat, who spoke sixty-eight languages; and Lomb Kat, a Hungarian who taught herself Russian by reading Russian romance novels.

A scientific and medical revolution has crept up on us, based on study after study, from hundreds of laboratories around the world. It is no longer just a theoretical shift: every one of us will be touched by it, and many of us already have been. The meaning of disease, our understanding of the human body, and crucial decisions about what we all need to know and what choices we make about our health are at stake. Welcome to the new world of personalized medicine.

When it comes to mastering a foreign language, learning around your interests makes all the difference. But finding books designed for language learners can be hard! This book fixes that. For the first time, you’ll learn to improve your Spanish while learning about the history and theory of rock’n’roll.

Even the most erudite among us use words like apocryphal, facetious, ironic, meteorite, moot, redundant, and unique incorrectly every day. Don’t be one of them. Using examples of misuse from leading newspapers, prominent public figures and famous writers, among others, language gurus Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras explain how to avoid these perilous pitfalls in the English language.

As the main spoken language of the Jews for more than a thousand years, Yiddish has had plenty to lament, plenty to conceal. Its phrases and expressions paint a comprehensive picture of the mind-set that enabled the Jews of Europe to survive persecution: they never stopped kvetching about God, gentiles, children, and everything else.

Half the world's population speaks a language that has evolved from a single prehistoric mother tongue. First spoken in Stone Age times on the steppes of central Eurasia 6,500 years ago, this mother tongue spread from the shores of the Black Sea across almost all of Europe and much of Asia. It is the genetic basis of everything we speak and write today - the DNA of language.

We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that’s not how he saw his own career. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach deaf students to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine. The Invention of Miracles takes a new look at an American icon, revealing the astonishing true genesis of the telephone and its connection to another, far more disturbing legacy of Bell’s.

The Maya forged one of the greatest societies in the history of the ancient Americas and in all of human history. Long before contact with Europeans, Maya communities built spectacular cities with large, well-fed large populations. They mastered the visual arts, and developed a sophisticated writing system that recorded extraordinary knowledge in calendrics, mathematics, and astronomy. The Maya achieved all this without area-wide centralized control.

Sixteen historians, all members of the Society of Independent Southern Historians, have come together to write this truthful history of America specifically for home-schooled students. Herein is a history that is truthful, concise, yet comprehensive, written especially for students of middle school and high school age and for the parents who provide guidance through the home school educational approach. The 40 student lessons in this book present 278 years of our history.