Words! Words! Words!- Words are fun! Words understood, explained, defined, differentiated, used, abused; words of great writers and poets, words of schoolboys and girls; descriptive, active, perceptive, living words - these are the themes of Dr. Andrew Scotland's book. By examples, suggestions, exercises, narrative, poetry and above all by humour, he seeks to rouse the reader to an interest in and a right use of words. The approach is daring: schoolboy puns jostle with sublime passages from the great masters of words; lighthearted sketches offset thorough and scholarly examinations of the derivations of words, and Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes.
This book introduces the most important problems of reference and considers the solutions that have been proposed to explain them. Reference is at the centre of debate among linguists and philosophers and, as Barbara Abbott shows, this has been the case for centuries. She begins by examining the basic issue of how far reference is a two place (words-world) or a three place (speakers-words-world) relation.
The book tackles some weighty issues, which certainly isn't unusual for a theoretical physics book, but one of the key features of this book is that the authors never lose sight of how important it is to confirm theory with experiment. Nor do they forget that the average reader doesn't care about esoteric concepts - they want to know why the theories are important in their lives. In other words, this book is best suited for the artful reader, who likes beautiful language more than mathematics, but is willing to tolerate some equations and be unintimidated by them.
In Words for the Taking author Neal Bowers takes the reader on an unusual hunt for a literary stalker. A poet and teacher by profession, Bowers became a detective out of necessity when he discovered one of his poems had been plagiarized and repeatedly published by someone calling himself David Sumner. Later, he learned Sumner had stolen more of his work and the poems of other writers as well. Here he describes his almost surreal search for the plagiarist and its surprising aftermath.
