Word-lovers rejoice! This fascinating book reveals the amazing and bizarre histories of language's building blocks. "A sorcerer of language".--"Publishers Weekl

Words are essential to our everyday lives. An average person spends his or her day enveloped in conversations, e-mails, phone calls, text messages, directions,

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gain

The author of Opening Up draws on groundbreaking research in computational linguistics to explain what our language choices reveal about feelings, self-concept

This book looks at how language has evolved around the globe from ancestral proto-languages to our recognisable modern tongues. It demonstrates how language has