San Antonio College Library

In this thoroughly revised, updated edition of his classic "Language in Thought and Action, " S.I. Hayakawa discusses the role of language in human life, the many functions of language, and how language--sometimes without our knowing--shapes our thinking.

Provides an illuminating account of words and phrases coined in recent years that reflect the state of American society, politics, and business.

"There has never been," Nunberg writes, "an age as wary as ours of the tricks words can play, obscuring distinctions and smoothing over the corrugations of the actual world . . . Yet as advertisers and marketers know, our mistrust of words doesn't inoculate us against them." These are the years of talking dangerously, and Nunberg is a sure guide to the pitfalls. With illuminating intelligence and devastating humor, Nunberg decodes the changing syntax...

Characterizes Dicken's novelistic language by relating it to linguistic representations of women in contemporary non-fictional works (handbooks on womanly conduct, documentary works on prostitution, and Florence Nightingale's Cassandra). This analysis reveals that Dickens' individual account of the womanly ideal is shot through with contradiction. Fallen women are both disgraced and valuable, worthless and powerful; "ideal" women are desirable and...