Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation. Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. And yet the most frequent
Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President of the United States, was called “Silent Cal” because he was a true “man of few words.” His predecessor in the White House, Warren Harding, was an expansive orator, who described his own style of
It is widely held that man is the only creature with language. But that may not be true. African vervet monkeys are always looking around for danger, and when they perceive a threat, they give an alarm that is specific