Learning Japanese
Official secrecy and institutional rivalry obscured the achievements of two crash programmes hastily launched to teach Japanese during the Second World War.
Language
Things, Many and Varied
How the index helps us to understand, categorise and engage with the world.
Medieval Minims
The hidden meaning of a medieval pen-twister.
The Invention of Chinese
Believing language would unify their struggling nation, Chinese officials began a project to create a national language and define what it meant to speak Chinese.
‘Did You Hear the One …’
What to do when a good joke becomes bad taste.
Making Massacre
A Dutch conspiracy trial in the Indonesian archipelago gave birth to a sadly enduring English word.
The Early Life of Gibberish
What does it mean to speak gobbledygook, mumbo-jumbo or jargon? Such words are more fraught than the playful games of the Jabberwocky suggest.
Here Be Monsters
In Anglo-Saxon England a hill could be a dragon’s lair and a ditch the home of gods.
Pause and Effect
The past and future of punctuation marks.
Lost in Translation
Writing treaties in two languages can lead to unexpected problems.