George Orwell's essay examines the power of language to shape political ideas. It is about the importance of writing concisely, clearly and precisely and the dangers to our ability to think when language, especially political language, is obscured by vague, cliched phrases and hackneyed metaphors. In it, he argues that when political discourse trades clarity and precision for stock phrases, the debasement of politics follows. First published in Horizon in 1946, Orwell's essay was soon recognised as an important text, circulated by newspaper editors to their journalists and reprinted in magazines and anthologies of contemporary writing. It continues to be relevant to our own age.

The cultures of the world have chosen different ways to make spoken language visible and permanent. The original edition of Writing Systems represented the first time that modern linguistic principles were brought to bear on a study of this. Now this new edition brings the story up to date; it incorporates topics which have emerged since the first edition (such as electronic techniques for encoding the world's scripts), together with new findings about established topics, including the ultimate historical origin of our alphabet. Featuring a series of detailed case studies of scripts of diverse types, and giving due attention to the psychology of reading and learning to read, the book is written so as to be accessible to those with no prior knowledge of any writing systems other than our own.

This innovative book explores think tanks from the perspective of critical policy studies, showcasing how knowledge, power and politics intersect with the ways in which think tanks intervene in public policy. Expert contributors offer multidisciplinary analyses of the history of policy advice and expertise and highlight recent examples of how think tanks navigate public debates, political arenas and the backstage of decision-making. They provide an overview of historical developments in the emergence and evolution of think tanks and consider how current think tanks produce policy narratives and exercise influence through the power of ideas. Focusing on institutional structures and social forces, chapters explain how national and transnational think tank landscapes are organized and how think tanks shape knowledge production infrastructure in different governance contexts. The book concludes that evaluating this infrastructure is crucial for ensuring that policy discourse serves collective interests and inclusive policy learning in diverse democratic polities. This book's evaluation of the impact of think tanks on expertise, democracy and social justice, while utilizing rigorous empirical research, will be useful for scholars and students of public policy, political theory and public administration and management. It will also be beneficial for think tankers and policy analysts.

What did a gongfarmer do? How is a chaperone connected to a bird of prey? What is the etymology behind cloud architect? And is there a link between secretaries and secrets? The story behind these (and many more) job titles is rarely predictable and often fascinating. In this highly original book, Alexander Tulloch examines the etymology behind a selection of trades and professions, unearthing intriguing nuggets of historical information along the way. Here you will find explanations of common surnames, such as Spencer, Hayward and Fletcher; obsolete jobs such as pardoner, cordwainer or telegraph boy; and roles for the modern era, such as wedding planner, pundit and sky marshal. Packed with additional etymological information and literary quotations, this book will appeal not only to linguists but also to anyone interested in the quirky twists and turns of meaning which have given us the job titles with which we are familiar today.

Exploring the potential of poetry and poetic language as a means of conveying perspectives on ageing and later life, this book examines questions such as 'how can we understand ageing and later life?' and 'how can we capture the ambiguities and complexities that the experiences of growing old in time and place entail?' As poetic language illuminates, transfigures and enchants our being in the world, it also offers insights into the existential questions that are amplified as we age, including the vulnerabilities and losses that humble us and connect us. Literary gerontology and narrative gerontology have highlighted the importance of linguistic representations of ageing. While the former has been concerned primarily with the analysis of published literary works, the latter has foregrounded the individual and collective meaning making through narrative resources in old age. There has, however, been less interest in how poetic language, both as a genre and as a practice, can illuminate ageing. This volume suggests a path towards the poetics of ageing by means of presenting analyses of published poetry on ageing written by poets from William Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens; the use of reading and writing poetry among ordinary people in old age; and the poetic nuances that emerge from other literary practices and contexts in relation to ageing - including personal poetic reflections from many of the contributing authors. The volume brings together international scholars from disciplinary backgrounds as diverse as cultural psychology, literary studies, theology, sociology, narrative medicine, cultural gerontology and narrative gerontology, and will deploy a variety of empirical and critical methodologies to explore how poetry and poetic language may challenge dominant discourses and illuminate alternative understandings of ageing.

The 'face' is the most identifiable feature of the human body, yet the way it is entrenched in language and cognition has not previously been explored cross-linguistically. This comparative volume continues the series on embodied cognition and conceptualization with a focus on the human 'face'. Each contribution to this volume presents descriptions and analyses of how languages name the 'face' and utilize metonymy, metaphor, and polysemy to extend the 'face' to overlapping target domains. The contributions include primary and secondary data representing languages originating from around the world. The chapters represent multiple theoretical approaches to describing linguistic embodiment, including cultural, historical, descriptive, and cognitive frameworks. The findings from this diverse set of theoretical approaches and languages contribute to general research in cognitive linguistics, cultural linguistics, and onomastics.

Yiddish, the language of Eastern-European Jews, has so far been mostly described as Germanic within the framework of the traditional, divergence-based Language Tree Model. Meanwhile, advances in contact linguistics allow for a new approach, placing the idiom within the mixed language spectrum, with the Slavic component playing a significant role. So far, the Slavic elements were studied as isolated, adstratal borrowings. This book argues that they represent a coherent system within the grammar. This suggests that the Slavic languages had at least as much of a constitutive role in the inception and development of Yiddish as German and Hebrew. The volume is copiously illustrated with examples from the vernacular language. With a contribution of Anna Pilarski, University of Szczecin.

What can the languages spoken today tell us about the history of their speakers? This question is crucial in insular Southeast Asia and New Guinea, where thousands of languages are spoken, but written historical records and archaeological evidence is yet lacking in most regions. While the region has a long history of contact through trade, marriage exchanges, and cultural-political dominance, detailed linguistic studies of the effects of such contacts remain limited. This volume investigates how loanwords can prove past contact events, taking into consideration ten different regions located in the Philippines, Eastern Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and New Guinea. Each chapter studies borrowing across the borders of language families, and discusses implications for the social history of the speech communities.

So this English professor comes into class and starts talking about the textual organization of jokes, the taxonomy of puns, the relations between the linguistic form and the content of humorous texts, and other past and current topics in language-based research into humor. At the end he stuffs all

Offering an in-depth, interdisciplinary analysis of Arabic and English language narratives of the Islamic State terrorist group, this book investigates how these narratives changed across national and media boundaries. Utilizing insights and methodologies from translation studies, communication studies and sociology, Islamic State in Translation explores how multimodal narratives of IS and survivors were fragmented, circulated and translated in the context of the terrorist action carried out by Islamic State against the people and culture of Iraq, as well as against other victims around the world. Closely examining four atrocities, the Speicher massacre, the enslavement of Ezidi women, execution videos and videos of the destruction of Iraqi cultural heritage, Balsam Mustafa explores how the Arabic and English-language narratives of these events were translated, developed, and fragmented. In doing so, she advances a socio-narrative theory and reconsiders translation in the new media environment, within a broader socio-political field of inquiry.

The vocabulary of past times, no longer used in English, is always fascinating, especially when we see how it was pilloried by the satirists of the day. Here we have Victorian high and low society, with its fashionable and unfashionable slang, its class awareness and the jargon of steam engines, motor cars and other products of the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, people had strong feelings about the flood of new words entering English. Swearing, new street names and the many borrowings from French provoked continual irritation and mockery, as did the Americanisms increasingly encountered in the British press. In this intriguing collection, David Crystal has pored through the pages of the satirical magazine, Punch, between its first issue in 1841 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, and extracted the articles and cartoons that poked fun at the jargon of the day, adding a commentary on the context of the times and informative glossaries. In doing so he reveals how many present-day feelings about words have their origins over a century ago.

How is it possible to write down the Japanese language exclusively in Chinese characters? And how are we then able to determine the language behind the veil of the Chinese script as Japanese? The history of writing in Japan presents us with a fascinating variety of writing styles ranging from phonography to morphography and all shades in between. In Japanese Morphography: Deconstructing hentai kanbun, Gordian Schreiber shows that texts traditionally labelled as "hentai kanbun" or "variant Chinese" are, in fact, morphographically written Japanese texts instead and not just the result of an underdeveloped skill in Chinese. The study fosters our understanding of writing system typology beyond phonographic writing.