Illustration of Robert De Niro by Matt Kindt
illustration by Matt Kindt
Issue 1, Fall 2014

You Talkin’ To Me? The Controversies of Language

Welcome to “You Talkin’ To Me? The Controversies of Language,” the premiere issue of The Common Reader. We hope you find our offering of articles about words, their meanings, and consequences, a stimulating, mind-tingling tour through language in all its forms and contexts, from politics, imagery, and music to food and the very dissemination and iteration of words themselves.

Hue, Eye and Tongue

Few linguists share comparable command of the plethora of languages that are vividly and routinely on display throughout Deutscher’s text. The work is bold, ambitious, and strives to combine insights from history, classical studies, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, biology, and physiology, to address the recurring intellectually perplexing conundrum regarding ways that language may shape thought. In the final analysis, however, this book is an argument in favor of multidisciplinary approaches to analyses that strive to examine the inevitably complex relationship between language and cognition.