AUSTRALIA-WIDE LOW FLAT RATE $9.90
Rik Smits is a linguist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His books include The Puzzle of Left-handedness, also published by Reaktion Books, and Dawn: The Origins of Language and the Modern Human Mind.
Whether in hieroglyphic, written word, or shouted profanity, humans have historically enjoyed a rich reservoir of language reserved for abuse, insult, threat, the expression of frustration and the many other situations which call for the more colorful phraseology. This brick of a book looks at those vocabularies and how they are employed across different cultures and in a multitude of scenarios, from children striving to shock to the advertising industry seeking attention in order to shift product. -- Strong Words Magazine There is such a fountain of anarchic, foul-mouthed, carnivalesque energy, obscenity, and linguistic mayhem on display here, so much of it hilariously enjoyable, that life would be a dull affair without it. -- Sunday Times If you want to know why you swear, what counts as a potty mouth in other cultures, and why words can hurt more than sticks and stones, then this rampage of a book is for you: it will amuse, embarrass, provoke, enlighten, and annoy the hell out of you about all forms of dirty language--and dirty politics. It is also a passionate defense of the joys and failures Western democracy, liberalism, and rationality--for which using words well really matters. --Simon Goldhill, professor of Greek, University of Cambridge, fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and foreign secretary of the British Academy
The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book...
Lexical perplexities and cracking...
Paperback
$24.99
In Stock 😊
