Wasted words

In Ghost Words and Invisible Giants, Lheisa Dustin engages psychoanalytic theory to describe the “language of suffering” of iconic modernist authors H.D. and Djuna Barnes, tracing ...

Abstract The book, divided into fourteen chapters, is devoted to the origin and history of English words and idioms. Although only a hundred of them are featured in ...

This chapter studies how scribes handled the testimonies given during the trials related to the Great Tomb Robbery case at the end of Egypt’s Twentietn Dynasty. Some stylistic unif...

Songwriter. Pop star. Gay activist. Cancer survivor. Advocate for cancer victims. Human being. Melissa Etheridge is all of these things, and all of these elements of who she is hav...

Hamlet has long been recognized as concerned with fundamental philosophical issues about identity, responsibility, intimacy, mourning, and agency. How is the play’s address to thes...

This chapter surveys the linguistic landscape of taboo avoidance and its role in word loss and meaning change. Freud invoked Carl Abel’s “universal phenomenon” of Gegensinn in supp...