Paul Tripp identifies the attitudes and assumptions behind our words and shows how to develop God-honoring communication.

A timely call for recovering the true meanings of the nineteenth-century terms that are hobbling current political debates Nationalism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and capitalism are among the most fiercely debated ideas in contemporary politics. Since these concepts hark back to the nineteenth century, much of their nuanced meaning has been lost, and the words are most often used as epithets that short-circuit productive discussion. In this insightful book, Harold James uncovers the origins of these concepts and examines how the problematic definition and meaning of each term has become an obstacle to respectful communication. Noting that similar linguistic misunderstandings accompany such newer ideas as geopolitics, neoliberalism, technocracy, and globalism, James argues that a rich historical knowledge of the vocabulary surrounding globalization, politics, and economics—particularly the meaning and the usefulness that drove the original conceptions of the terms—is needed to negotiate the gaps between different understandings and make fruitful political debate once again possible.

The Swahili coast of Africa is often described as a paragon of transnational culture and racial fluidity. Yet, during a brief period in the 1960s, Zanzibar became deeply divided along racial lines as intellectuals and activists, engaged in bitter debates about their nation's future, ignited a deadly conflict that spread across the island. War of Words, War of Stones explores how violently enforced racial boundaries arose from Zanzibar's entangled history. Jonathon Glassman challenges explanations that assume racial thinking in the colonial world reflected only Western ideas. He shows how Africans crafted competing ways of categorizing race from local tradition and engagement with the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.

In a new era of global conflict involving non-state actors, At War with Words offers a provocative perspective on the role of language in the genesis, conduct and consequence of mass violence. Sociolinguistics meets political science and communication studies in order to examine interdependence between armed conflict and language. As phenomena attributed only to humans, both armed conflict and language are visible on two axes: language as war discourse, and language as a social policy subject to change by the victorious. In this unique volume, internationally known contributors provide original data and new insights that illuminate roles of text and talk in creating identities of enemies, justifications for violence, and accompanying propaganda. Incorporating contexts from around the world, this collection's topics range from a radio talk show hosts' inflammatory rhetoric to the semantic poverty of the lexicon of mass destruction. The first eight chapters discuss war texts. How does language serve as a vehicle to incite, justify, and resolve an armed conflict? Case studies from the US to China, and from Austria to Ghana detail such a progression to, through, and from war. The book's second part reflects the understanding of language as a symbol of power achieved by a victorious side in war. Five chapters discuss cases from Okinawa, Croatia, Cyprus, Palau, and Northern Ireland. Edited by a sociolinguist and a political scientist, At War with Words includes chapters by Michael Billig, Paul Chilton, Ruth Wodak and a dozen other prominent linguists and communications scholars. This book will be of interest to linguists, media scholars and political scientists, but is also accessible to any reader interested in language and war. Teachers will find particular chapters useful as course material in discourse analysis, language policy, war and peace studies, conflict resolution, mass communication, and other related disciplines.

When Kenneth Burke conceived his celebrated “Motivorum” project in the 1940s and 1950s, he envisioned it in three parts. Whereas the third part, A Symbolic of Motives, was never finished, A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) have become canonical theoretical documents. A Rhetoric of Motives was originally intended to be a two-part book. Here, at last, is the second volume, the until-now unpublished War of Words, where Burke brilliantly exposes the rhetorical devices that sponsor war in the name of peace. Discouraging militarism during the Cold War even as it catalogues belligerent persuasive strategies and tactics that remain in use today, The War of Words reveals how popular news media outlets can, wittingly or not, foment international tensions and armaments during tumultuous political periods. This authoritative edition includes an introduction from the editors explaining the compositional history and cultural contexts of both The War of Words and A Rhetoric of Motives. The War of Words illuminates the study of modern rhetoric even as it deepens our understanding of post–World War II politics.

Departing radically from traditional histories, A WAR IN WORDS tells the story of the First World War on a compelling, human scale through the letters and diaries of its participants -- whether combatants, eyewitnesses or victims. This was a young person's war and these people record their experiences with all the immediacy and passion of youth. They talk to us directly from within the war itself and from all sides of the conflict -- from the testimony of a Serbian teenager, one of Franz Ferdinand's assassins, to the final entry from a French soldier as he revisits a battlefield in 1919, realising he and the rest of the world have changed irrevocably. Most of these letters and diaries have never been published in English before. They were uncovered during extensive research across twenty-eight countries for the major ten-part series THE FIRST WORLD WAR, broadcast on Channel 4 in autumn 2003. The series will introduce many of the characters who appear in this book and will, like the book, recount the complex history of the war though the lives of the individuals caught up in it.

How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? In this ambitious book, Michael T. Gilmore argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with the demands for silence and circumspection that accompanied the antebellum fear of disunion and the postwar reconciliation between the North and South. Proposing a radical new interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature, The War on Words examines struggles over permissible and impermissible utterance in works ranging from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” to Henry James’s The Bostonians. Combining historical knowledge with groundbreaking readings of some of the classic texts of the American past, The War on Words places Lincoln’s Cooper Union address in the same constellation as Margaret Fuller’s feminism and Thomas Dixon’s defense of lynching. Arguing that slavery and race exerted coercive pressure on freedom of expression, Gilmore offers here a transformative study that alters our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture and its fraught engagement with the right to speak.