“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” observed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922. We might ask, accordingly, how does language shape reality, arbitrating human experience of ...

There is no question that my love of language is an inherited trait. My father was a lay linguist, in addition to being a teacher, writer, and public intellectual. In the last few years of his life, ...

A single English verb carries more definitions than any other in the language. Lexicographers have confirmed that the word ...

Scientists say they have made an atlas of where words' meanings are located in the brain. The map shows that words are represented in different regions throughout the brain's outer layer. To make the ...

Is language core to thought, or a separate process? For 15 years, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has gathered evidence of a language network in the human brain — and has found some similarities to ...

Traditionally the relation between philosophy and religion has been one either of identity, as in the early Middle Ages, or of hostility, as in the Age of Reason. In the eighteenth and nineteenth ...

“Stop gaslighting me,” I joked to my brother. He rolled his eyes, “That’s not what the word ‘gaslighting’ means.” “Stop gaslighting me about gaslighting!” I yelled back. Merriam-Webster has just ...