Language History

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.

Reneé Drummond-Brown’s tome My INK Bleeds Black, speaks volumes to our testament as wisdom turns her poetic pages on women of color. Therefore, writing is a vital tool for me to pen (snippets of) our honest historical dark accounts if I want to live and prosper in this thing called life. Furthermore, vantablack INK is brilliantly lent and smeared throughout this book. As a result, the infallible scripted Word “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:18 King James Version - KJV) ...

Hut! Hut! Hike! explores the history of football terminology by examining when and why more than 400 familiar words and expressions entered the game. By linking the game’s evolution to changes in its language, readers learn the origins of first string, basic fundamentals, X’s and O’s, long snapper, and hundreds more terms used in every football conversation or broadcasts. In addition, you will learn which change in the game led to dropback and handoff becoming popular, and why the names for many defensive player positions emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Organized in easy-to-read, bite...

Is being good the way to heaven? Being religious? Jesus said, “You must be born again.” John Wesley, spiritual forefather of Methodist, Pentecostal, and Holiness churches and the Salvation Army, explains Jesus’ words in this brief classic. One of the standard sermons Wesley required his circuit riders to learn and re-preach, The New Birth shows that religion and morality are good but new life in Jesus is vital. Wesley pulls no punches. But his 18th-century English is hard for most modern readers. As with his best-selling John Wesley’s The Character of a Methodist, David Wentz has ...

I Found My Voice: Book of Poems, by author Reneé Drummond-Brown, is an ode to me. Yes! Finally! An ode to me! And-why-not? Drummond-Brown’s emotional poems are creatively written in varied and/or unruled meter. The librettos are meant to be to be read from the depths of one’s soul, sAng-ed from a broken heart, singing sad songs sung with passion through another’s mouth, hummed with heartfelt pleas and poignantly moaned from within like nobody’s B.I. business. Drummond-Brown’s voice is loud, proud and clear addressing subject matters relating to closed topics. You best not tell ...

Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never traveled further than forty miles from his home in Kvnigsberg. How appropriate it is then that in his philosophy he should deny that all knowledge was derived from experience. He insisted that all experience must conform to knowledge. According to Kant, space and time are subjective; along with various "categories," they help us to see the phenomena of the world, though never its true reality.

Do you know how your brain operates to store memories? Do you know how it works to recall them? Would you like to be able to improve your memory? The memory is a crucial function of the brain and is essential for many of the things we do on a daily basis. Without a memory we would be unable to recall names, places, favorite foods and a whole host of other things we take for granted. In his book, Strategic Memory: The Natural History of Learning and Forgetting, Dr. Chong Chen takes a look at memories, their functions and how they work in 5 parts; The process of memory The encoding and ...

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.

For low - to high-intermediate learners. Improve your German and expand your vocabulary with topics that matter. When it comes to mastering a foreign language, listening around your interests makes all the difference. But finding audiobooks designed for language learners can be hard! This audiobook fixes that. For the first time, you’ll learn to improve your German while listening about the history of World War II.

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 chart the life and times of these enigmatic squiggles, both exotic (¶) and everyday (&).

Read Between the Lines Poetry Book, by author Reneé Drummond-Brown, depicts precept upon precept, line upon line, little here and a little there, stroke by stroke, mark by mark, ink by ink, stripe by stripe, link by link, stain by stain, and blood by blood.

How 305 Civil War Words and Terms Will Help You Learn About The Civil War The soldiers of the Civil War had their own way of saying things. The words, slang, and phrases of the Billy Yanks (Union soldiers), Johnny Rebs (Confederate soldiers), and the civilians of the 19th century are unique and strange to our modern-day ears. The language of the people of Civil War times was rich and colorful, it reflected their lives and times. Do you want to learn about the Civil War? Would you like to know how the soldiers and citizens of Civil War times spoke? What slang and phrases were used in the ...

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.

There’s no denying that women of color are portrayed as exceptional gems with oceanic depths in Reneé Drummond-Brown’s Black Exotic Pearls: Poetry Book. The ebony beauties are very aware of what to hold inside and what can be shared openly. She knows that she’s the original Mother of all living Pearls. She’s real. She’s authentic. She’s sincere. Her culture is from the west-south side of the northeast sea. Where foreign seas meet and mingle it’s indisputable that black pearls are always a good choice (catch if you will). But those that channel-surf that colorful ocean and ...

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.

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."

After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.

In The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter.

Claire Wilcox has been a curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum for most of her working life. In Patch Work, she steps into the archive of memory, deftly stitching together her dedicated study of fashion with the story of her own life lived in and through clothes. From her mother's black wedding suit to the swirling patterns of her own silk kimono, her memoir unfolds in spare, luminous prose the spellbinding power of the things we wear.

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).