by Christine Kenneally BH | Oct 14, 2008 | Languages
In the first nine pages of Henry Hitchings' The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, words can see. (They are "witnesses.") They are containers (with fossils in them). Language is a combination of earth and artifact. (It allows us to do...
by Christine Kenneally BH | Oct 14, 2008 | Brain, Complexity, Evolution, Genes
The Bengalese finch is an aviary bird, bred over centuries for its attractive plumage. It comes in various combinations of white, black and brown. One particularly pretty version is silver. It is also prized for its gregarious and easy-going nature and its complex...
by Christine Kenneally BH | Oct 14, 2008 | First human..., Music, Whales
Songs that travel for thousand of miles. Songs that replicate over thousands of years.
by Christine Kenneally BH | Jul 18, 2008 | Books
It’s not like pork. That misunderstanding about the taste of human flesh is attributable to one of those linguistic mix-ups between explorers and locals: Apparently Pacific Islanders called human meat “long pig” because wild pig was the only other...
by Christine Kenneally BH | May 22, 2008 | The First Word
Now that we're shaking off the old-fashioned idea of human uniqueness, we must be wary of any suggestion that what makes humans human can be explained by a single thing. If that 'thing' feels intuitively right, we must be doubly suspicious. The one...
