Introduction

Summary

This is a beach book, a long-flight book, a public-transportation book, a before-I-go-to-bed book. It has been written to entertain first and educate second. What is meant by a geography of words here are language-specific and culture-specific configurations of words. Fascinating cases of differences in the way that languages organize their vocabularies are portrayed here. As famous Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson once noted, languages differ in what they must convey, not in what they may convey. The examples discussed in this book concern situations where various languages express ideas in their word stocks in a way that may be curious to English speakers and those where English may be strange to speakers of other languages. The choice of English is determined not only by the fact that this book is written in English and intended for English speakers but also that for many years now the English language has held a special place in international communication.