Geoffrey Hughes is Professor of the History of the English Language at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. A graduate of Oxford University, he has held academic and research posts at Cape Town, Harvard and Turin. His main interests are in historical semantics and sociolinguistics on which he has written over twenty papers and two books, Words in Time (Blackwell, 1988) and Swearing (Blackwell, 1991). He is a consultant for the Collins Dictionaries on South African English and has been editor of the journal English Studies in Africa.

• Preface vii Acknowledgements ixSources and Abbreviations x1 Introduction: Words and Social Change 12 Words of Conquest and Status: The Semantic Legacy of the Middle Ages 323 Moneyed Words: The Growth of Capitalisim 674 The Mobilization of Words: Printing, the Reformation and the Renaissance 925 The Fourth Estate: Journalism 1256 Advertising Linguistic Capitalisim and Wordsmitting 1557 Words and Power: Democracy and Language 1828 Ideology and Propaganda 2039 Conclusion: Verbicide and Semantic Engineering 224Epigraph Sources 251Bibliography 253Subject Index 263Word Index 268

Geoffrey Hughes is Professor of the History of the English Language at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. A graduate of Oxford University, he has held academic and research posts at Cape Town, Harvard and Turin. His main interests are in historical semantics and sociolinguistics on which he has written over twenty papers and two books, Words in Time (Blackwell, 1988) and Swearing (Blackwell, 1991). He is a consultant for the Collins Dictionaries on South African English and has been editor of the journal English Studies in Africa.

• Preface vii Acknowledgements ixSources and Abbreviations x1 Introduction: Words and Social Change 12 Words of Conquest and Status: The Semantic Legacy of the Middle Ages 323 Moneyed Words: The Growth of Capitalisim 674 The Mobilization of Words: Printing, the Reformation and the Renaissance 925 The Fourth Estate: Journalism 1256 Advertising Linguistic Capitalisim and Wordsmitting 1557 Words and Power: Democracy and Language 1828 Ideology and Propaganda 2039 Conclusion: Verbicide and Semantic Engineering 224Epigraph Sources 251Bibliography 253Subject Index 263Word Index 268