Book description
Think you know language? Think again.
There are languages that change when your mother-in-law is present. The language you speak could make you more prone to accidents. Swear words are produced in a special part of your brain.Over the past few decades, we have reached new frontiers of linguistic…
- Coming soon!
Why read it?
1 author picked Don't Believe a Word as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Shariatmadari writes beautifully, and this book will make you think differently about how we use language and how that language uses and shapes us, both as individual actors and as a society. Our language – those everyday vocabularies and grammars that we deploy without a second thought – is neither original nor value-free; instead, “to speak is ‘to swim in an inherited stream of images and words’”, crafted by generations before us. For small talk, this may not matter so much. But for the bigger, weightier things in life, for the things that really matter, the way we talk can…
From Clare's list on The best books on how we use metaphor and how metaphor uses us.
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