“ Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language..”
~ Henry James
Do you ever wonder about how things get their names? Why is it that people like to coin terms? What’s the difference between a euphemism and a fancy word?
We humans love to speak. In fact, one might argue that it’s the thing that we do best. In Tom Wolfe‘s final work, The Kingdom of Speech, he makes the point that language is truly the super power that separates man from beast.
He also debunks Darwin’s idea that our way with words was somehow an evolutionary adaptation leaving open the unsolved question nagging linguists to this day: “What exactly is language and where did it come from?”
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