Words, like biological species, are born and then, someday, they die. The half-life of a word is roughly 2,000 years, meaning that in that interval about half of all words are replaced with an unrelated (noncognate) word. Where do the new words come from? There are numerous dimensions along which new words could vary from old words, so it may not be easy to see how to enter this problem. However, extending our small worlds metaphor and the observation of clusters in language, we tell a simple story that mirrors biological theories about the origin of species. Language has urban centers with well-populated and well-connected meanings (like *food* and *red*). It also has rural fringes, where words live more isolated lives as hermits with limited connections to other words (like *twang* and *ohm*). Are new words more likely to be born in urban centers or in the rural fringes?

In this chapter, we discuss both the structural and the packaging perspectives in conceptual terms. It is worth noting that the communications literature is diffuse and poorly integrated. Some of it reads more like self-help books. To be fair, it does draw on many different disciplines – some more rigorous; others less so. As such, our purpose here is to provide a clear framework for the pollster and practitioner. There is considerable art and creativity to effective communications. Look at Cannes Lion every year- the Oscars of the PR and Marketing world. There is incredible creativity in the crafting of impactful messages. But public opinion is public opinion – with a few basic compositional truths. By nailing them down, the pollster is able to provide structure to the communications process.

This introduction gives an overview of the scope of “bitch”, following its twists and turns from its humble beginnings as a word for a female dog, through to its popularity in the present day.

The wordless, often unwritable sound of the vox confusa is usually contrasted with the verbal, writeable sound of the vox articulata. The former was held to be irrational and meaningless; the latter, rational and significant. This chapter will examine the role which the vox confusa played in Augustine’s thought. It will argue that, in his later works, we encounter a wild(er) Augustine who appears to be more willing than his earlier self to recognise and exploit the vox confusa in a theological context.

What is a word? Are names (of people, places, gods, buildings, etc.) words? In antiquity spelling was not standardised, and gender, suffixation, and inflectional categories could also be variable: what kind of divergences indicate that a variant form found in an ancient source should be considered a distinct word from other related forms? Although such questions cannot be definitively answered, the approach taken in this book is clarified and justified by detailed comparison with other lexica.

This chapter aims to build an understanding of the differences between words and characters in Chinese by introducing the ways that words and Chinese characters are formed. Particular attention is paid to learning and writing Chinese characters.

[6.1] Statutory interpretation is to be ‘text-based’. ‘The text’ here refers to the words whose meaning or effect is in issue. Rooted in constitutional principles, consideration of the text is the starting point of the interpretative process. The text supplies the basis for ascertaining the ordinary or grammatical meaning and similar meanings. In turn, that supplies a presumptive and weighty meaning. After having been read in context, the text is also the ending point of the interpretative process. It is where meaning is ultimately held to ‘reside’. But, for an interpreter, the text is not limiting in the sense that he or she must choose between its grammatical or semantic possibilities, read in isolation. The paramount object remains to give effect to the intention of Parliament.

In this chapter I traverse Merleau-Ponty’s account of language as the medium of thought, in which conceptual significations inhabit words instead of lying behind them (a mistake common to empiricist and intellectualist theories). We do not inspect an indicating word and indicated thing to reach a verbal signification. Rather we learn it as we learn to use a tool, by seeing it employed in a certain situation. Through the words that we utter we act and project action possibilities ahead of ourselves, as well as our attitudes towards these possibilities. Language is manifested as creative or speaking speech and as habitual or spoken speech. This explication is followed by an outline of Merleau-Ponty’s view of our affective lives in knowing, acting and loving, in which we always encounter others and things within a certain mood or mode of attunement, one that can widen or narrow down the world of possibilities.

The introduction outlines the kind of attention to prose techniques that forms the basis for the chapters that follow. It claims that prose is all too infrequently granted this kind of attention. In part, this is because of the claims to ordinariness that prose writing often proposes for itself, where prose comes to seem either prosaic or prosy. Critical and philosophical traditions have reinforced the view that prose is at its best when it effaces itself, when it conceals its own wording. But this principle has tended to distract from the craft of prose. The introduction outlines the parts of prose (punctuation, words, sentences, and so on) and the various genres (realism, comedy, Gothic, science fiction, and creative non-fiction) that subsequent chapters take up for inspection as regards the techniques of prose themselves.

The chapter on words shows that even when mimicking worn-out, hackneyed speech styles, the vitality of creative language use can rescue wording from those atmospheres – of marketing and of politicking, for example – where language has become tired and predictable. The chapter considers the play of chance in any formation of wording, as the unruliness of graphemes and phonemes contributes over and above semantics. It shows that words are activated by syntax as they pass into phrases and that style emerges from the unpredictable influence of their scriptive, acoustic and etymological properties.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, changes in philosophy and aesthetics as well as the increasing prominence of ‘pure’ instrumental music brought to a head questions over the meaning and value of music. While the merit of most of the fine arts (literature, painting, sculpture) was beyond serious doubt, instrumental music’s supposed lack of content posed a peculiar problem to writers. This chapter presents four main Romantic strategies used to argue for music’s meaning, including the use of programmes as well as the rethinking of the relations between music and feeling, music and words, and between content and form. Covering the first half of the nineteenth century, it encompasses the view of philosophers and composers as well as writers and critics, from Schopenhauer, Hoffmann, and Tieck to Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Brendel, and Hanslick.

This chapter gives an introductory overview of the strategies for forming words in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter begins with a discussion of the form class distinctions that are found, including the categories of noun, verb, adjective, adposition, and adverb. Of the various processes for forming words, the chapter focuses on compounding and reduplication, which are relied upon widely in languages of the area, and affixation, which is a speciality of Austroasiatic languages in particular. The chapter features a section on the uses of tone in word formation, a feature of Hmong-Mien languages. Psycho-collocations are discussed: an area-wide form of compounding involving the mention of body parts to denote emotional and psychological states.

The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, we recall a collection of basic mathematical notions that are needed for the discussions of the following chapters. Second, we have a first, still purely mathematical, look at the central topics of the book: languages, relations and functions between strings, as well as important operations on languages, relations and functions. We also introduce monoids, a class of algebraic structures that gives an abstract view on strings, languages, and relations.

In this chapter, the author discusses how speech is conceptualized using highly physical vocabulary. Words can be "hidden" in the mind, or "retracted" ("grasped back"). He then discusses how words can be injected directly into the mental apparatus of the listener ("take it to heart"), and notes that the conduit metaphor of communication described by Michael Reddy and prevalent in the modern languges does not appear to be prominent in the diction of the Iliad and Odyssey. The author further discusses the metaphor of words as arrows, and applies conceptual blending theory to the problematic phrase "winged words", arguing that the metaphor takes arrows rather than birds as the framing domain. He then surveys further metaphors for speech involving building and the crafts, before discussing the collection metaphors for speech and understanding in Homer. At the close of the chapter, the author suggests ways in which Homeric metaphors for speech may highlight or hide aspects of the target domain (speech), and argues that the polysemy of terms such as μῦθος and ἔπος arrises out of a metonymy that exists in English as well.

This chapter presents the data of the child/caregiver corpus.