Chapter 6 returns to H. G. Wells to offer a fuller account of this writer’s longstanding fascination with animal experimentation, a practice he supported. Analysis of The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), short stories, and essays reveal this author’s investment in contemporary scientific debates surrounding the thorny issues surrounding non-human pain introduced in Chapter 5. Despite differences in genre and tone, the selected texts each exploit the uneasy relationship between injury, experience, and expression to raise compelling questions about pain’s purpose and limits. The period’s vivisection debates were an important and productive context for Wells who capitalised on the ambivalence they produced, undermined the generic expectations of writings about the subject, and considered whether literary and linguistic methods could uniquely capture – or even solve – the problem of pain.

This chapter examines first the gradual infiltration of logical empiricism into British philosophy during the 1930s, mainly through lectures by Schlick and Carnap, and not necessarily in accordance with Neurath’s ideas. L. Susan Stebbing played an important role as mediator, although she reflected on differences between the Viennese and the British analytical approaches. A. J. Ayer’s bestselling book Language, Truth, and Logic prepared the ground to some extent, but, by the time Neurath arrived to give a series of lectures at Oxford University, philosophers were mostly absent serving in the war. Neurath’s lectures are reconstructed from his notes, and the changes and developments in his philosophy of science are examined, also with reference to his monograph Foundations of the Social Sciences. We show that Neurath’s late work adapted to British sociological and anthropological thinking, often at the cost of bitter debates with old friends, such as Rudolf Carnap.

This chapter outlines the geography and taxonomy of language use in the Caucasus region, highlighting notions such as the incompatibility of linguistic and genetic data. It discusses the regional specificity of Caucasus languages and the concept of Sprachbund, and the possibility of a source for Caucasian languages outside the region. It further examines putative connections between Kartvelian and Anatolia and Armenian with the steppe, and reviews the impact on Turkic- and Indo-European-speakers on populations of the Caucasus.

This chapter details Schopenhauer’s critique of a key modern ideology that grew increasingly strong during his own lifetime: nationalism. First, it notes how Schopenhauer argued that ethnic sameness cannot ground any moral obligations of individuals. Second, it turns to Schopenhauer’s critical dissolution of teleological national history, according to which nations are collective agents with a singular fate. For him, nations were not unified subjects with one shared destiny. Third, it reviews his caustic comments on the increased importance of the vernacular in scholarly communication and the attempt to establish an exclusively German literary canon. To Schopenhauer, nationhood was not even a useful category of cultural appreciation. Through this reconstruction, Schopenhauer emerges as a fierce antinationalist who questioned the importance of the nation as a supposedly cohesive community of mutual care, a unified historical subject, or even a meaningful cultural phenomenon.

This chapter considers the syntax of Hopkins’s poems. It places Hopkins’s syntax in the context of his devotional and artistic life, showing how his sentences negotiate the conflicting pressures exerted by Catholic faith and poetic ambition, personal idiosyncrasy, and the desire to be ‘intelligible’. It also places the poems in the context of larger syntactical trends, showing how Hopkins’s phrasing works with and against the grain of nineteenth-century usage, and addressing Hopkins’s interest in and anticipation of developments in Victorian philology. The chapter pays particular attention to ‘Myself Unholy’, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, and ‘Tom’s Garland’.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, like many of his contemporaries, was drawn as a young man to the lively visual arts scene in London in the 1860s and 1870s. From a family of professional and amateur sketchers and illustrators, he initially considered a career as an artist. What, then, did Hopkins see? What pictures did he look at, and what did he sketch? How did the careful cultivation of his eye, under the formative influence of John Ruskin, shape his later life as a Jesuit poet? How do we get from a visual culture that Hopkins shared with many others of his time and place to the powerful originality of his mature poems? Analyzing evidence from Hopkins’s surviving sketches, letters, and journals, this chapter explores the effects of Hopkins’s visual education on the language, the prosody, and the shaping force of grace in the poems.

The language of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry is notable for its imagistic intensity, for its intricate sonic patterning, and sometimes for its cryptic ambiguity. This chapter surveys several nineteenth-century contexts for Hopkins’s idiosyncratic diction. His interest in philology underlies his imitation of alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse and of the medieval Welsh system of versification known as cynghanedd, which involves complex structures of internal rhyme and consonant repetition. Additionally, like his contemporaries William Barnes and Thomas Hardy, Hopkins draws on regional dialect to capture the essences of certain landscapes, creatures, individuals, and trades. And given his predilection for neologizing and at times for elevating sonic gorgeousness over communicative clarity, he may also be read alongside Victorian nonsense writers such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Ironically, Hopkins’s interest in the deep roots of English drives his radical linguistic innovation – and his obscure vocabulary can allow him to channel modes of divinely inspired expression.

The psychiatric interview is an important tool in the field of psychiatry, allowing the clinician to connect with the patient and to gather information that will help determine a treatment plan. The skills for this crucial assessment are not necessarily “learned on the job,” but rather should be taught with dedicated time and attention to ensure that interviewers become both confident and effective. Continuous self-reflection is essential for improvement, and is important for both inexperienced trainees and experienced mental health clinicians alike.

This chapter offers a reconsideration of what might appear a fairly unproductive period in Hopkins’s writing life, at least when seen in comparison to his Welsh and Irish phases. It discusses the years Hopkins spent in northern England, first during his Jesuit training and then later in his work as a priest. The chapter begins by outlining Hopkins’s varied experience of northern England, both while based at Stonyhurst College in rural Lancashire, and in his postings in industrial and urban centres in the north-west. It considers his responses to these locations via his poem ‘Felix Randal’, a poem written while Hopkins was based in Liverpool. Proposing that the poem’s language owes much to Hopkins’s knowledge of Lancashire, the chapter makes a case for ‘Felix Randal’ as revealing Hopkins’s ideal northern England.

This chapter examines the popularity of Kinyarwanda-language rap and hip hop in urban Rwanda. It considers how it can be understood as a genre both of anger and sorrow, revealing Kigali as a site not of progress and modernity but rather of poverty and deception. The genre’s use and invention of Kinyarwanda slang is considered, as well as its politics. The chapter argues that a simple resistance–domination binary is unhelpful for truly understanding hip hop’s local complexities. Instead, it takes into account the carefully guarded silences that hip hop artists maintained, and the ways in which the performance of swaga was less available to young women than to young men.

Language is the natural currency of most social communication. Until the emergence of more powerful computational methods, it simply was not feasible to measure its use in mainline social psychology. We now know that language can reveal behavioral evidence of mental states and personality traits, as well as clues to the future behavior of individuals and groups. In this chapter, we first review the history of language research in social personality psychology. We then survey the main methods for deriving psychological insights from language (ranging from data-driven to theory-driven, naturalistic to experimental, qualitative to quantitative, holistic to granular, and transparent to opaque) and describe illustrative examples of findings from each approach. Finally, we present our view of the new capabilities, real-world applications, and ethical and psychometric quagmires on the horizon as language research continues to evolve in the future.

The Introduction is a chapter-length outline of the of the book which does more than simply summarise. Though not exhaustive, it includes both explanation and discussion of the historical context of Brexit and Brexitspeak, combined with a description of the linguistic tools of analysis. The starting point is that without language politics could not happen, so it is essential to understand how language works in general and how it is strategically deployed by politicians. In this chapter populism is discussed as an unwritten ideology best characterised by its demagogic appeal to an idea of ‘the people’ within a nationalist notion of ‘the British people’, at the same time promoting a friend-foe antithesis, stirring up emotion and avoiding reasoned argument. Demagoguery is a little used term in political science but highly relevant to the present state of democracy. Indeed, demagoguery exploits and undermines democracy. It is both an effect and a cause of post-truth politics, where truthfulness and facts are overridden. The final section takes a closer look at the fundamentals of language and language use that are at issue in examining the discourse of Brexit.

Chapter 6 delves deeply into the subject of communications in groups. We discuss the factors that hamper effective communications. We also explore the effects that gender and more broadly, member diversity can have on the nature of our communications. We include a section on factors and techniques that improve the quality of member communication in a diverse society.

This chapter explores how identities were forged and developed under the Merovingians, from the creative fiction of ‘Frankishness’ to more personal identities defined by gender and social status. It examines how identities can appear different through stories, laws, dress, and language, highlighting the importance of how people defined and presented themselves according to need and circumstance. It takes seriously the contention that identity formation fed into discourses of power because they structured hierarchies and issues of inclusion and exclusion.

This chapter examines the temporal texturing of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. Unlike the Aeneid, the Argonautica is not tied to a specific political project, but it uses epic and specifically Homeric narrative models more allusively to shape its reader’s experience of the world. Focusing on Orpheus’ cosmogonic song, the ecphrasis of the Acherousian headland, and then the consequences of desire as felt by Medea, Phillips draws attention to the small moments of temporal shaping within the Argonautica – how time is experienced by the characters and the readers on the level of the individual line, phrase and even word – which contain the many perspectives offered by Apollonius on navigating the burden of living as a subject of history.