Word: linguistic
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Part of the distance between intellectuals and Italian Zeitgeist, according to Pertile, was the fault of Italy’s cultural and linguist fragmentation. “In 1930, most Italians did not speak Italian,” but rather conversed in mutually unintelligible dialects. Still fewer could actually read. As a result, Italian fascists had little trouble keeping the nation’s arts and literature in check, devoting far more effort to censoring news reports on suicides—or even reports of bad weather—because of their adverse affects on morale. “Literature...
...linguistic fencing extends to the current Congress, where Republicans have a whole list of bills designed to curb lawsuits and in selling that plan, seem unable to use the word lawsuit without "frivolous" appearing before it. Democrats, long behind in the word battle, have hired a linguist from the University of California Berkley named George Lakoff to help them. And they have a few new phrases themselves. They're going back to describing their views on abortion as "safe, legal and rare" as Bill Clinton did and when asked about gays, invokes the term "equal rights" rather than "gay marriage...
Initially, military officials tried to prevent disclosure of the Saudi's story. When Saar, who spent 61/2 months at Guantnamo as a linguist and intelligence analyst, submitted the early draft of his manuscript to the military, as the confidentiality agreement he signed requires, Guantnamo officials marked the section about the Saudi for redaction, stamping it SECRET. The account, they advised the Pentagon, revealed interrogation methods and techniques that were classified. The Pentagon wrote back that if the Guantnamo officials could not cite solid legal grounds for censoring the material, the document would be cleared. The memo from...
DIED. LARISA BOGORAZ, 74, one of seven Soviet dissidents who in 1968 participated in a risky demonstration in Red Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia; of a stroke; in Moscow. The linguist and human-rights activist, who spent four years exiled in a Siberian woodworking plant, once wrote an open letter to KGB chief Yuri Andropov to inform him that she was keeping a record of Soviet oppression...
...nature of genius to zero in on its purpose. In the 1790s a young French boy named Jean-Francois Champollion, the son of a bookseller, became obsessed with ancient languages--not only Latin and Greek but also Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Chaldean. According to The Linguist and the Emperor (Ballantine; 271 pages), by Daniel Meyerson, Champollion was a dreamy, solitary kid who mouthed off in class, but as a schoolboy, he assembled a 2,000-page dictionary of Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language. Luckily for him, French soldiers in Egypt soon discovered the Rosetta stone, a chunk of gray...