We use salty or artful language to win arguments, slander, cheat and bully, as well as to express feelings of joy or frustration and blow off steam. Rik Smits delves into the magic of oaths and profanity, art and advertising, probes the lure of fake-news and propaganda, and explores invective and off-colour jokes the world over. The Art of Verbal Warfare shows why conversation dies in crowded lifts, what drives you to curse at your laptop and what makes some political bigshots fall, but not others. This is, when all is said and done, the story of how we get through life without coming to physical blows.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
If you want to know why you swear, what counts as a potty mouth in other cultures, and why words can hurt more than sticks and stones, then this rampage of a book is for you: it will amuse, embarrass, provoke, enlighten and annoy the hell out of you about all forms of dirty language - and dirty politics. For it is also a passionate defence of the joys and failures Western democracy, liberalism and rationality - for which using words well really matters.' * Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek, University of Cambridge, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and Foreign Secretary of the British Academy *
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Dateigröße
ISBN-13
978-1-78914-593-9 (9781789145939)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Rik Smits is a linguist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His books include The Puzzle of Left-handedness (Reaktion, 2011) and Dawn: The Origins of Language and the Modern Human Mind (2016).
