Seven Words You Can't Say on Yahoo

1 August 2002

In the 1970s, comedian George Carlin became famous with a routine about seven words one can’t say on television. Carlin’s words were all of the “four-letter” variety. But in this more enlightened age, a different category of words is posing a problem, those that can be interpreted as part of a computer scripting language like JavaScript.

JavaScript is used to give commands to a computer and is commonly used in websites to run search and other such functions. While most JavaScript is innocuous, malicious hackers can use it to run damaging programs. To combat this potential menace, over a year ago Yahoo started subtly changing the text of HTML messages sent over its free email service. (Plain ASCII text messages, which can’t hide JavaScript, are unaffected.) In all, seven words used in JavaScript were changed to synonyms that aren’t. These are:

• eval is changed to review
• mocha is changed to espresso
• expression is changed to statement
• javascript is changed to java-script
• jscript is changed to j-script
• vbscript is changed to vb-script
• livescript is changed to live-script.

The changes are made surreptitiously, without the sender’s knowledge or authorization.

But in a fit of either supreme silliness or incompetent coding, the replacement of these words doesn’t respect word boundaries. So the word medieval, which contains eval, is changed to medireview. Evaluate becomes reviewuate. And retrieval becomes retrireview. And what does Yahoo have against mocha? Well, it turns out that mocha is a JavaScript command that allows a program to enter commands into the user’s browser. (Java/Mocha, get it?)

Googling on medireview, for instance, turns up some 1,100 websites that have incorporated the “word” into their sites. A New York Times book review that is reprinted on another web site includes the sentence: “ It was the great Barbara Tuchman who pointed out the capital difficulties of writing about the Middle Ages: that medireview chronology is very hard to pin down.” Evidently someone in the editorial chain forwarded the text of the Times review via Yahoo email. Book reviews are not the only thing affected, other affected sites include university course descriptions, scholarly papers, and bibliographies.

What is really odd, is that this alteration of text is utterly unnecessary. Altering the HTML tags in the script makes sense and many email programs do this (Yahoo also alters tags), but altering plain text doesn’t add security.

Book Review: The Man Who Deciphered Linear B

1 August 2002

Andrew Robinson has written a clear and concise biography of Michael Ventris, the English architect who solved one of archaeology’s most vexing problems. In 1900, archeologists discovered clay tablets on the island of Crete containing a strange script. The tablets dated to c. 1450 BC, about two centuries before the Trojan War. The writing was utterly unintelligible—no one even knew what language it was in.

For fifty-odd years the tablets were undecipherable. More tablets with the same script, dubbed Linear B, were discovered on mainland Greece, at Pylos in 1939 and at Mycenae in 1950. Unlike Champollion’s decryption of Egyptian hieroglyphics a century before, there was no Rosetta Stone for Linear B, no bilingual inscriptions that pointed the way.

In the first half of the century, archeologist Arthur Evans, who discovered the first Linear B tablets, made minute progress. He determined that most of the tablets were storeroom inventories from the palace at Knossos and he identified the numerals in the script. He also determined that the script was syllabic, rather than alphabetic or hieroglyphic, but the bulk of the writing was unintelligible. Evans believed that the language was a previously unknown one that he dubbed Minoan.

A few scholars postulated that the language was an early form of Greek, but they were generally ignored and scholarly consensus agreed with Evans. Linear B characters resembled a later (c. 800 BC) Cypriot script that was known to be a form of Greek, but there were crucial differences. Notably, the letter S, which is the most common final consonant in Greek, did not seem to be found in the final position in Linear B words. The 1939 discovery of Linear B tablets in mainland Greece revived the Greek hypothesis, but still scholars tended to side with Evans’s Minoan hypothesis. The tablets in Pylos could have been from a Minoan outpost on the mainland or the work of Minoan scribes hired by early Greeks who were illiterate.

Michael Ventris was born in 1922, the son of an English army officer and a Polish immigrant. He never attended university, training as an architect instead. He had no background in archeology or linguistics, although he did have an amazing facility for languages—Ventris spoke most modern European languages fluently and could learn a new one in a matter of weeks. He seemed a most unlikely candidate for solving this vexing puzzle, except that he had three qualities that others lacked. He was clearly a genius, he had a dogged determination to solve the mystery of Linear B that bordered on obsession, and he had an inheritance that allowed him to ignore his architecture career in favor of his hobby.

Ventris learned of Linear B at age 14, when he attended an exhibit of Greek and Minoan antiquities. Arthur Evans happened to be present and gave the boys an impromptu lecture on the Minoan civilization and the mysterious Linear B writing. Ventris was hooked.

He published his first scholarly article on Linear B in 1940, when he was just 18 years old. In the paper, he rejected Evans’s Minoan language hypothesis, opting instead for a conclusion that the language was actually an early form of Etruscan. Ventris would believe this hypothesis to be correct right up until he made his breakthrough in decipherment in 1953.

Robinson’s book focuses on Ventris’s methods. It is these methods, and his genius, that enabled Ventris to succeed where so many others had failed. The fact that he was not a practicing academic probably worked to his advantage. He did not attempt to hoard his findings, rather he was very open in sharing his work. Throughout the late-40s and early-50s, he privately circulated twenty different versions of his notes with other scholars working in the field. He seemingly had no ego to boost, nor a professional reputation to gain and maintain.

Unlike scholars like Evans, Ventris did not maintain his hypotheses in the face of mounting evidence against them. While he firmly believed that the language was in fact Etruscan, he willingly abandoned that belief when no longer stood up against the weight of evidence. Whether this was due to lack of confidence from his lack of formal credentials, or whether Ventris was just a man without ego doesn’t matter. He had that rare quality possessed of great scholars—the willingness to be proven wrong.

Ventris’s decipherment was largely his own work. He did, however, rely upon the work of a few others with whom he communicated. He worked especially closely with fellow Englishman John Chadwick and he relied on methods developed by American Alice Kober. (Kober disliked Ventris and considered him a dilettante. She refused to answer his queries, but Ventris gained much of his basic methodology from Kober’s published work.) Chadwick was especially helpful. In addition to being a professor of philology at Oxford, he had also worked as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park during the war. He provided a philological framework for Ventris’s work as well as helpful decoding techniques. Ventris knew all the scholars working in the field and communicated with them all, but in the end, it was he alone who cracked the code.

In the two breakthrough months of May and June 1953, Ventris deciphered the script. He determined that it was indeed an early form of Greek. Kober had identified several three-character words, or triplets, in the Knossos tablets as being of interest. The triplets were absent from the mainland tablets found at Pylos and Ventris made the intuitive leap that these were place names on Crete. Even though he still firmly believed the language to be Etruscan, for the sake of experiment he assumed the language was Greek and using the phonetic values of the some similar characters in the Cypriot script, Ventris tentatively identified the triplets as the names of towns on Crete. From there he began working out the phonetic values of the other characters. He worked out the spelling and grammatical rules that differentiated it from Classical Greek—the final S, for instance, is a later development in the language. In the process he realized that his Etruscan hypothesis had to be wrong and the language was Greek, albeit a much earlier form than had previously been discovered.

One might ask, so what? It seems to be an interesting intellectual achievement—on the par with calculating pi to the nth place, but knowledge of the contents of Minoan storerooms can’t be of great value. Nothing could be more wrong. Ventris’s decipherment revolutionized the historical view of the ancient Mediterranean world. Previously, it had been thought that the Minoans were a separate civilization, predating the Hellenic culture. Ventris conclusively demonstrated that in fact they were Greeks, and that Hellenic civilization was far older than had been thought. Also, the fact that the language was Greek has given historical linguists a wealth of data on language evolution and change. Once Ventris made his breakthrough, there was a continuous line of evolution of the Greek language stretching back some 3,450 years.

Robinson’s book can be a bit dry. He painstakingly describes the process that Ventris used to decipher the script and that is not for everyone. Only those with a real interest in linguistics or cryptography will find great interest within, which is not to say that the book requires formal training to be understood. To the contrary, Robinson writes quite clearly for the lay audience. It’s just that there probably aren’t that many that will be interested enough to wade into the material.

And unfortunately, the book is not relieved by interesting details of Ventris’s life. He led a quite ordinary, suburban English lifestyle. Other than the war years, when he was an RAF navigator, he had little excitement or daring in his life. The only thing different about him was his passions for ancient scripts and skiing (not a common hobby in England of the 1940s and 50s). Ventris died in an automobile accident in 1956, at the age of thirty-four.

But for those who do find such linguistic details interesting or are looking for insight into genius and how the mind works, Robinson’s book is well worth reading. A shorter account of Ventris’s discovery can also be found in Simon Singh’s The Code Book (Doubleday, 1999). Singh’s book is primarily about codes and cryptography, but he devotes half a chapter to Ventris and the decipherment of Linear B.

Hardcover, 176 pages, Thames & Hudson; ISBN: 0500510776, June 2002.

Word of the Month: Hollywood

1 August 2002

Summer is the time for big-budget, American film releases. This year we have, among others, Star Wars: Episode Two, Minority Report, and another Austin Powers movie. So in honor of summer days spent in dark, air-conditioned theaters, the word of the month for August is:

Hollywood, n. and adj., the American film industry. Named after the district in Los Angeles, California that is home to several major film studios. Generalized use dates to 1926. In 1886, Kansas prohibitionist Horace Wilcox carved out an area of what was then known as Rancho La Brea to found a community based on strict religious principles and strong moral underpinnings. His wife, Daeida, named the community Hollywood, after a friend’s Chicago home. The first film studio opened there in 1911 and the moral underpinnings of the community went downhill from there.

If you are one of those people who sit in the theater long after the movie is over watching the seemingly interminable credits roll by, you will see many strange titles and terms. What exactly does a gaffer do? Why does a best boy deserve that superlative? The following is a collection of terms that you will typically see in movie credits, plus a few others thrown in because they are interesting.

Above The Line, adj., budgetary term denoting expenses incurred before production starts, usually associated with creative talent, such as the director, writer, producer, and actor salaries (costs other than technical crew and equipment). See below the line.

Additional Photography, n., reshooting of individual scenes once principal photography is complete, usually because the scene didn’t turn out well.

ADR, n., abbrev. for automatic dialogue replacement, the re-recording of dialogue by actors in a sound studio during post-production. Also known as dubbing.

Art Director, title, also production designer, the designer of a film set, often having a major hand in the overall look and presentation of a film.

Assistant Director, title, also A.D., the person responsible for logistics, order, and discipline on the set and for keeping the production on schedule.

Associate Producer, title, nominally a producer’s second-in-command, sometimes serves as the de facto producer of a film with the credited producer functioning only as a figurehead.

Below The Line, adj., physical costs of production, including technical crew, music rights, publicity.

Best Boy, title, the chief assistant or second-in-command of a technical crew, originally the chief assistant to the gaffer, but more recently used for other crews as well. 

Billing, n., the size and position of actors’ names in the credits and promotional material for a film. An actor whose name appears first or higher than the others has top billing. If actors’ names appear at the same time or at the same height they have equal billing. Sometimes actors are given diagonal billing, where precedence varies depending on whether you read the names from top to bottom or from left to right.

Body Double, title, an actor whose body is used in place of another’s in a particular shot, especially in nude scenes or where a greater degree of physical fitness is required. Cf. stand-in, stunt double.

Boom Mike, n., a long pole with a microphone on the end.

Boom Operator, title, member of the sound crew, places and maneuvers the boom mike.

Box Office, n., also gross, the total amount of money paid by the public to see a film during its first run. The term does not include money from video release, associated merchandising, or television. For US films, it often does not include foreign box office receipts.

Cableman, title, member of the sound crew, runs and maintains cables for the sound equipment.

Cameo, n. & adj., a bit part played by a famous actor.

Camera Operator, title, also second cameraman, the technician who operates the camera during production. 

Casting Director, title, assists the director and producer in auditioning and selecting actors and negotiating actor’s contracts.

Cinemascope, trade name, a type of widescreen projection.

Cinematographer, title, also director of photography, first cameraman, and lighting cameraman, in charge of lighting the set and photographing the film, with the director chooses the camera angles and movement for each shot and then selects the appropriate lens, filters, exposure, and lighting required to capture the shot.

Clapboard, n., also clapper or slate; a board that holds identifying information about a take, such as movie title and scene and take numbers, filmed at the start of each take; on top is a hinged stick that is “clapped” to provide the editors with a cue for audio-visual synchronization.

Continuity, n., internal self-consistency within a film, such as no change in costume or location of props or positions of actors between shots.

Co-Producer, title, a producer who performs a substantial creative role.

Cut, n., 1. an abrupt change in camera angle/view made in editing; 2. the final, edited version of a movie; 3. a command shouted on set to indicate the end of a take.

Dailies, n., also rushes, the first prints of film made on a daily basis during production. Used by the director and producers to gauge how the film will look.

DGA, n., abbrev. for Director’s Guild of America, a union of directors and other film and video personnel.

Director, title, the person responsible for the artistic aspects of the production of a film and usually the person with final artistic control of the film.

Director’s Cut, n., the director’s initial edited version of the film, completed without studio interference. Has a synchronized soundtrack but often lacks score and special effects. More recently, used as a marketing term for a completely polished version made under the director’s complete artistic control.

Dolby, trade name, any number of audio formats and systems produced by Dolby Laboratories.

Editor, title, the person responsible for assembling the completed takes into a final version of the film.

Executive Producer, title, in charge of business and legal aspects of a production, typically not involved with the creative aspects of production. In television, however, executive producers are often the chief creative minds behind a series.

Extra, title, an actor with a non-specific, non-speaking role, usually in crowds or as part of the background of a scene.

Fake Shemp, title, also shemp, a double whose face is not seen, usually used when the principal actor is not available. Supposedly from the use of a double in Three Stooges films to complete scenes after the death of Shemp.

Foley, n. and adj., incidental sound effects, such as footsteps, slaps, etc. created during post-production.

Gaffer, title, the chief electrician of a film unit. Responsible for supervising the positioning of lights before and during shooting.

Grip, title, a general-purpose handyman. Duties include erection of sets, carpentry, moving equipment and props, and other physical tasks.

Key Grip, title, the head grip.

Leadman, title, supervisor of the swing gang.

Lined Script, n., version of the shooting script annotated by the script supervisor during production with the details of what was actually filmed.

Location Manager, title, person who manages logistics and permission for location shooting.

Location, n. and adj., filming done outside of a studio.

Martini Shot, n., the last shot in a day’s filming.

Outtake, n. a take not used in the final version of a film.

Post-Production, n. and adj., work done after principal photography is complete, usually includes editing, musical score, and visual effects.

Pre-Production, n. and adj., work performed before principal photography begins, includes script editing, casting, location scouting, and set construction.

Principal Photography, n., also production, the filming of the primary scenes of a movie, especially those involving actors.

Producer, title, the person in charge of a production, except in creative matters which are the province of the director. Responsible for financing, hiring key personnel, and arranging for distribution.

Production Assistant, title, also P.A., person responsible for odd tasks on a set, gopher, courier, etc. Often assigned to assist an individual actor, producer, or director.

Prop Man, title, also property man or props, the person responsible for the availability, maintenance, and placement of all props on a set. 

Reverse Shot, n., a shot 180 degrees out from the previous shot, often used in dialogue scenes.

Scene, n., a unit of storytelling set in a single location or following a single actor or group of actors.

Score, n. and v., the musical component of a movie. Cf. soundtrack.

Screen Test, n. and v., a filmed audition.

Screenplay, n., a script; sometimes teleplay in television.

Screenwriter, title, the writer of a script.

Script Supervisor, title, the person in charge of recording what scenes have been filmed and how the filmed version deviates from the script, often responsible for continuity.

SDDS, abbrev., Sony Dynamic Digital Sound, trade name for a digital audio system.

Second Assistant, title, or second, assists the assistant director.

Second Unit, n., a small crew responsible for filming less important shots, e.g., scenery and crowd shots.

Set Decorator, title, responsible for furnishing the set with appropriate decorative furnishings—furniture, rugs, draperies, paintings, etc. 

Set Designer, title, plans the construction the set based on the orders of the art director.

Set Dresser, title, responsible for physically placing decorative furnishings on the set.

Set, n., 1. place where filming occurs; 2. artificially constructed background/location, usually in a studio, for filming.

Shooting Script, n., the version of the script from which a movie is filmed, contains technical notes on how it is to be filmed.

Shot, n., a continuous, unedited block of footage.

Slug Line, n. a header before each scene in a script that describes the location, time, and date the action is supposed to occur.

SMPTE, n., abbrev. for Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, an industry trade group.

Sound Man, title, in small productions, the single person responsible for all sound recording.

Sound Mixer, title, has overall responsibility for recording sound and acoustics on the set, supervises the sound crew.

Sound Recorder, title, member of the sound crew, operates recording equipment.

Soundtrack, n., 1. the audio component of a movie; 2. collection of songs used in the movie, often released as an album. Cf. score.

Special Effects, n., also SFX, artificial effects created on set to produce an illusion on film. Cf. visual effects.

Stand-In, title, a person who takes the place of an actor during lengthy technical set-up of a scene. A stand-in is not actually filmed. Cf. body double, stunt double.

Stock Footage, n., footage taken from a film library or from another movie, usually for time and budgetary reasons.

Stunt, n. and adj., a physically demanding or dangerous task required of an actor, often actually performed by a stunt double.

Stunt-Double, title, a performer who takes the place of an actor during a stunt or physically rigorous scene. Cf. body double, stand-in.

Swing Gang, title, crew of carpenters that construct and take down sets.

Take, n., a single recorded performance of a scene. Usually, multiple takes of each scene will be filmed.

Talent, n., the actors.

Technical Advisor, title, an expert who provides advice on a particular subject to make the film more realistic, e.g., a retired military officer advising about military matters in a war movie.

THX, trade name, a proprietary standard for theatrical sound systems. A number of different sound systems meet the THX standard.

Title Designer, title, the person who designs and creates the title and credit sequences.

Tracking Shot, n., a shot where the camera moves to keep a moving actor or object in frame; famous tracking shots include the opening scene of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and the entrance into the Copacabana in Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

Trailer, n., advertisement for a movie shown in theaters; originally added on to the final reel of a film by the theater.

Treatment, n., an abridged script containing descriptions of the characters and major scenes with only snippets of dialogue.

Unit Production Manager, title, coordinates and supervises all the administrative, budgetary, and scheduling details of the production.

Visual Effects, n., artificial effects introduced into the film during post-production.

Voice-over, n., also V.O., dialogue on the soundtrack but where the actor does not appear on screen; often used in transitions between scenes or in narration.

Walk-on, title, a minor role, usually without speaking lines.

Working Title, n., the tentative title during production; often changed for release.

Wrangler, title, the person responsible for handling animals on the set.

Wrap, n., the conclusion of shooting, either for a day or for the entire production.

Prescriptivist's Corner: Hopefully

1 July 2002

One of the more common prescriptivist admonitions concerns the adverb hopefully. Prescriptivist mavens tell us that the word should only be used in the sense of in a hopeful manner, and not in the sense of it is to be hoped. So if we say, “Hopefully, Vinnie will give us good odds on the horse,” we mean that Vinnie is very confident the horse will lose, not that the speaker is optimistic about his chances for Vinnie being generous.

There are two problems with this strict interpretation of the meaning of hopefully. The first is that it is contrary to general usage. And the second is that it makes no sense grammatically.

People use hopefully all the time to mean it is to be hoped. “Hopefully, it will be sunny for the wedding” and “hopefully, Vinnie will let me skip a payment” are common formulations. It is true that this is a relatively recent usage, but it is one that has caught on like wildfire, especially in American speech. The Oxford English Dictionary only records this sense of the word from 1932.

But the underlying grammatical tradition is much older. The optimistic use of hopefully is as a sentence adverb. There are two distinct types of adverbs. A verb phrase adverb modifies the verb, as in “promptly pay Vinnie the money you owe him.” Promptly indicates the speed with which the money should be paid. A sentence adverb describes the attitude of the speaker, as in “seriously, you should not defer payment to Vinnie.” Seriously does not modify the verb defer, it reinforces the tone the speaker wishes to impart in the complete sentence.

Sentence adverbs have a long and distinguished history in English. Briefly dates to 1514 and was used by Shakespeare; seriously is from 1644; strictly, 1680; roughly, 1841; frankly, 1847; and honestly, 1898. Why should hopefully be any different just because it is a bit newer?

Some ardent prescriptivists retort that sentence adverbs like curiously can be converted into adjectival phrases with the form of “it is _____ that” with little or no change in meaning. So, the sentence “Curiously, Vinnie didn’t ask for payment” can be rendered as “it is curious that Vinnie didn’t ask for payment.

But, this only works for some sentence adverbs. “Frankly, you should pay Vinnie before he breaks your legs” cannot be rendered as “It is frank that, you should pay…”

There are a few cases, however, where the two meanings of hopefully can be confused, and here the ardent prescriptivists have a point. When someone says, “hopefully, the quarterback will hand the ball off to Jones,” there is no way to know exactly what is meant. Is Jones a reliable man who will get the first down? Or does he have a history of fumbling and handing the ball off to him is an act of faith? Where such confusion can occur, it is probably best to avoid using the word.

But in most cases, there is no possibility of confusion. When we say, “Hopefully, Vinnie will let me skip a payment” there is no doubt about meaning and our optimistic, if perhaps naïve, attitude.

Book Review: Power of Babel

1 July 2002

John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at the University of California Berkeley, has authored The Power of Babel, an overview of linguistic change. The book is aimed at the layperson and attempts to convey linguistic “truths” and smash popular myths about the nature of language and how it changes.

McWhorter does a superb job of taking what should be an impossibly broad topic, the history of language—all language—and distilling it down into a small number of discrete principles of change. Humans have been speaking languages for 150,000 years. There have been tens of thousands of languages throughout the millennia. Yet they all share common features and they change in patterned, if unpredictable, ways.

The Power of Babel frequently turns commonly held beliefs and perspectives on their head. For example, most people would accept that written language is “standard” and that spoken language is a poorer cousin. Actually, the opposite is true. We have been speaking for some 150,000 years, but writing for only 6,000. The oral properties of language are dominant and tend to drive change, with written language lagging behind and struggling to keep up. Writing, or more specifically printing, has had an impact on the pace of language change though. Just compare the difference in two centuries of change between Chaucer and Shakespeare with the four centuries between Shakespeare and today. The pace of change has slowed considerably since printing press came into widespread use. This is not just true of English, but also of other languages. The codification of grammar and spelling that comes with printing retards, but does not stop, language change.

Another widely held misperception is that the languages of primitive peoples are also simple and primitive compared to the languages of technologically advanced societies. Actually, the opposite is usually true. Grammatically, the languages of hunter-gatherers tend to be far more complex than modern European languages. McWhorter gives the example of the West African Fula language, which has some sixteen different grammatical genders (grammatical gender has only a tangential relation, at best, to sexual gender). Furthermore, within each gender the markers vary arbitrarily among the nouns, and there can be as many as four different variants for each marker. Fula makes one long for those days in 8th grade English when the teacher tried in vain to instruct us in the proper use of the subjunctive case.

Perhaps the most disturbing myth for many will be the fact that there is no “proper” way to speak or write. There are endless grammatical options and none is inherently superior to another. It doesn’t matter if you designate syntax through markers or through position in the sentence; both are equally effective. There may be social consequences and communications problems for individuals who speak in a non-standard fashion, but linguistically there is no good or bad and changes in grammatical patterns don’t mean a “dumbing down” or degradation of a language.

Each of his seven chapters and the epilogue address a particular aspect of language change. The first chapter deals with specific forms of linguistic change. McWhorter identifies six different types of linguistic change that are common to all language. The second chapter addresses dialects and how the concept of individual “languages” is a false one—there are only dialects. The third chapter deals with how languages mix and borrow—not just words but also linguistic concepts—from one another. And so on.

The book does suffer somewhat from the lack of a central organizing theory of language change. There is a unifying topic, language change, and some metaphors that are used consistently throughout, such as comparing language change to biological evolution. But he provides no central theory for historical change that unites the chapters. Perhaps though, this is too much to ask for. The individual chapters stand on their own. Essentially, the book comprises eight independent, but topically related, essays on linguistic change.

McWhorter writes in a readable and entertaining style. He peppers the text with references to popular culture, Asterus & Obelix cartoons, jokes, and personal reminiscences.

Still, The Power of Babel is not a casual read. Despite the non-academic style and references to The Simpsons, it is at its core a serious book. It is filled with examples of linguistic concepts and changes from a staggering number of different languages: English, Hindi, Fula, French, Zulu, Cheyenne, Turkish, Japanese, and many others. While these are interesting and compelling examples and the variety of languages represented contributes to the richness of McWhorter’s arguments, the continual examples in foreign languages disrupt the narrative flow. The book is better for the examples; it’s just that sometimes the reader is in for some heavy slogging in the middle of the chapters.

For the academically trained linguist, The Power of Babel offers little that is new. But for the layperson it is a (mostly) readable overview of how languages change and why. It dispels some common myths and provides insight and perspective on the one thing that makes humans unique in the animal kingdom, language.

Hardcover, 384 pp., W.H. Freeman & Co., Feb. 2002, $26.00.