English Language History

Like many people, you’ve probably used idioms or phrases like these without giving them a second thought. But if you were to take a moment to step back and learn about them, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to discover the mesmerizing and sometimes outright bizarre origins to these fun sayings! In Why Do We Say That?, we have curated 202 of the most regularly used idioms, proverbs, turns of phrases, and colloquial terms that have the most fascinating backstories. For each phrase, we explain how it was coined, how its use evolved, and how it gained its contemporary use.

How four tools enabled humanity to control its destiny What enabled us to go from simple stone tools to smartphones? How did bands of hunter-gatherers evolve into multinational empires? Listeners of Sapiens will say a cognitive revolution - a dramatic evolutionary change that altered our brains, turning primitive humans into modern ones - caused a cultural explosion. In Transcendence, Gaia Vince argues instead that modern humans are the product of a nuanced coevolution of our genes, environment, and culture that goes back into deep time.

Introducing "The King James Bible Reference Guide" - your comprehensive and captivating resource for understanding the timeless and influential King James Bible. Explore the thrilling history, remarkable language, and profound impact of one of the world's most renowned translations of the holy scriptures, all in one engaging eBook! Dive into the dramatic origin story of the King James Bible, encompassing a rich tapestry of intrigue, devotion, and scholarship. Understand the significance of this profound translation and uncover how it has shaped literature, society, and spirituality ...

Under the Skin investigates the role of cross-cultural body modification in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century North America, revealing that the practices of tattooing and scalping were crucial to interactions between Natives and newcomers. These permanent and painful marks could act as signs of alliance or signs of conflict, producing a complex bodily archive of cross-cultural entanglement. Indigenous body modification practices were adopted and transformed by colonial powers, making tattooing and scalping key forms of cultural and political contestation in early America.

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.

Do you worry that you've lost patience for anything longer than a tweet? If so, you're not alone. Digital-age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us: the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to look beyond the day's news, the willingness to be alone. The shelves of the world's great libraries, though, tell a more complicated story. Examining the wear and tear on the books that they contain, English professor Leah Price finds scant evidence that a golden age of reading ever existed.

Idioms and expressions are a part of everyday English, but they aren't always the easiest to figure out. Many of these phrases have meanings that aren't immediately clear, and it can be confusing when they come up in conversations.

Rene Descartes spent most of his childhood in solitude, a situation that also came to characterize his adult life. Fortunately, these countless lonely hours helped Descartes produce the declaration that changed all philosophy: "I think, therefore I am." Eventually convincing himself to doubt and disregard sensory knowledge, Descartes found he could prove his existence through his thoughts. This internal information, he believed, was the true reality and external forces were hopelessly deceiving.

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.

All effective debaters, whether they know it or not, employ Aristotle's 3 basic principles of effective argument that form the spine of Rhetoric. In Poetics, Aristotle draws a dramatic distinction between poetry and history. This collection also includes Aristotle's body of work that has come to be identified as Logic.

Daily readings drawn from every century and every tradition of the Christian faith. Christianity through the ages... Ignatius, C.S. Lewis, John Calvin, Augustine, Catherine of Siena, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Polycarp, John Wesley, Karl Barth, and Billy Sunday. These names, and so many others, fill the pages of church history. Yet they remain strangers to most of us. How Great Is Our God will introduce you to Christianity’s most influential thinkers from every century and every tradition—modernized for today’s reader.

For the last 150 years, both popular and academic views have asserted that Jesus spoke Aramaic as his primary language of communication since supposedly Hebrew died out after the children of Israel were taken into Babylonian captivity. This view, however, is not based on the testimony of the Old Testament, the New Testament, historical sources, or Jesus' actual words. Just which language did Jesus and his disciples speak?

With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone. His ideas presaged a collective madness that had horrific consequences in Europe in the early 1900s. Though his philosophy is more one of aphorisms than a system, it is brilliant, persuasive, and incisive. His major concept is the will to power, which he saw as the basic impulse for all our acts. Christianity he saw as a subtle perversion of this concept, thus Nietzsche's famous pronouncement, "God is dead."

"More years ago than I care to reckon up, I met Richard Feynman." So begins The Language God Talks, Herman Wouk's gem on navigating the divide between science and religion. In one rich, compact volume, Wouk draws on stories from his life as well as on key events from the 20th century to address the eternal questions of why we are here, what purpose faith serves, and how scientific fact fits into the picture.

Surprising, entertaining, and illuminating, this is a must-listen for armchair travelers and word nerds. Our dictionaries are full of hidden histories, tales, and adventures from all over the world - if you know where to look.

Within this essay, Orwell criticises the 'ugly and inaccurate' written English of his time and examines the connection between political orthodoxies and the debasement of language. The essay focuses on political language, which, according to Orwell, 'is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind'. Bad English, he believed, was a vehicle for oppressive ideology.

David Hume reduced philosophy to ruins: he denied the existence of everything, except our actual perceptions themselves. I alone exist, he argued, and the world is nothing more than part of my consciousness. Yet we know that the world remains, and we go on as before. What Hume expressed was the status of our knowledge about the world, a world in which neither religion nor science is certain.

Struggling to reassert control over their Indochinese colonies after World War II, the French established a huge air-land base in the valley of Dien Bien Phu. But when the opposing Vietnamese People's Army (VPA) began massing its forces against the base in late 1953, French commanders seized the opportunity to draw their elusive enemy into a decisive set-piece battle. Defending a series of fortified positions which were reliant upon a single airstrip for reinforcement and resupply, the French troops quickly discovered that they had underestimated their enemy.

Scattered over the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea lie the remnants of failed peace proposals, international summits, secret negotiations, UN resolutions, and state-building efforts. The conventional story is that these well-meaning attempts at peacemaking were repeatedly, perhaps terminally, thwarted by violence. Through a rich interweaving of reportage, historical narrative, and powerful analysis, Nathan Thrall presents a startling counterhistory.

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.