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
Harvard and Google got married (NY Times article, Fri Dec 17) and have given birth to a database containing all the words in all the books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese and Russian. You—yes
It begins with an agonizing silence–The Duke of York standing at a microphone in Wembley Stadium trying to bring the world’s greatest exposition to a dignified conclusion for the entire British Empire listening on the radio. His stammering and stage