Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure claimed verbal thinking occurs through minimal differences of sound within a language. Change-a-Letter puzzles test this theory.

Traditionally the relation between philosophy and religion has been one either of identity, as in the early Middle Ages, or of hostility, as in the Age of Reason. In the eighteenth and nineteenth ...

We know that words change all the time and over time, a process language experts describe as “semantic shift,” semantics being the field of language concerned with meaning. Even if we may not ...

Learn how early human language relied on simple verb-noun combinations, and how these structures still survive today as clues ...

The death of Joan Didion, the most profound essayist about language since George Orwell, comes at a time when one of her most astute observations — that words have meaning and consequences — is being ...