Forbidden Words

Many words and expressions are viewed as 'taboo', such as those used to describe sex, our bodies and their functions, and those used to insult other people. This 2006 book provides a fascinating insight into taboo language and its role in everyday life. It looks at the ways we use language to be polite or impolite, politically correct or offensive, depending on whether we are 'sweet-talking', 'straight-talking' or being deliberately rude. Using a range of colourful examples, it shows how we use language playfully and figuratively in order to swear, to insult, and also to be politically correct, and what our motivations are for doing so. It goes on to examine the differences between institutionalized censorship and the ways individuals censor their own language. Lively and revealing, Forbidden Words will fascinate anyone who is interested in how and why we use and avoid taboos in daily conversation.

Award-winning poetry in a bilingual edition, by Portugal's best-known living poet.

Publisher Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Combinatorics on Words, WORDS 2013, held in Turku, Finland, in September 2013 under the auspices of the EATCS. The 20 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 initial submissions. The central topic of the conference is combinatorics on words (i.e. the study of finite and infinite sequence of symbols) from varying points of view, including their combinatorial, algebraic and algorithmic aspects, as well as their applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Combinatorics on Words, WORDS 2017, held in Montréal, QC, Canada, in September 2017. The 21 revised full papers presented together with 5invoted talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. Discrete geometry plays an expanding role in the fields of shape modeling, image synthesis, and image analysis. It deals with topological and geometrical definitions of digitized objects or digitized images and provides both a theoretical and computational framework for computer imaging.

This is an excellent collection of papers dealing with combinatorics on words, codes, semigroups, automata, languages, molecular computing, transducers, logics, etc., related to the impressive work of Gabriel Thierrin. This volume is in honor of Professor Thierrin on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Contents: Some Operators on Families of Fuzzy Languages and Their Monoids (P R J Asveld); Liars, Demons, and Chaos (C S Calude et al.); Conditional Grammars with Restrictions by Syntactic Parameters (J Dassow); Circularity and Other Invariants of Gene Assembly in Ciliates (A Ehrenfeucht et al.); Catenation Closed Pairs and Forest Languages (C-M Fan & H-J Shyr); Valence Grammars with Target Sets (H Fernau & R Stiebe); Minimal Recognizers and Syntactic Monoids of DR Tree Languages (F G(r)cseg & M Steinby); Visualizing Languages Using Primitive Powers (T Head); Disjunctivity (H Jrgensen); String Operations Suggested by DNA Biochemistry: The Balanced Cut Operation (L Kari & A P(un); How to Generate Binary Codes Using Context-Free Grammars (L Kiszonyi); Generation and Parsing of Morphism Languages by Uniquely Parallel Parsable Grammars (J Lee & K Morita); On the Generative Power of Iterated Transductions (V Manca); Words, Dyck Paths, Trees, and Bijections (H Prodinger); Iterated Morphisms with Complementarity on the DNA Alphabet (A Salomaa); Topologies for the Set of Disjunctive e -Words (L Staiger); and other papers. Readership: Researchers in mathematics and computer science."

This book is devoted to recent developments in symbolic dynamics, and it comprises eight chapters. The first two are concerned with the study of symbolic sequences of 'low complexity', the following two introduce 'high complexity' systems. The later chapters go on to deal with more specialised topics including ergodic theory, number theory, and one-dimensional dynamics.