Language usage, as I am using the term (others will have different ways of using it), is concerned with how we use language for specified purposes. My study of language usage includes an interest in how power at times distorts language, because it has the power to do so. Language usage also concerns itself with the distinction between rhetoric and reality. As well, the category is concerned with the formal, systematic study of rhetoric, and with humanity’s attempts to define reality.

Matthew Desmond (2023): Poverty persists in America because while those in poverty struggle, many who are not poor benefit from the poverty of their fellow citizens

In Seeing Like a State (1998), James C. Scott outlines a faith-based, uncritical, high-modernist ideology which gave rise to historic twentieth-century disasters

Haberman (2022), Galeotti (2022), and O’Kane (2022) among others are exemplars of the gangster genre of literary nonfiction

In The Soundscape: Our Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977, 1994), R. Murray Schafer devotes a chapter to Silence

The Death of Nature (1980) and The Culture of Nature (1991) offer complementary ways to look at nature

Carolyn Merchant (1980) outlines how Francis Bacon (1561-1626) fashioned a new ethic sanctioning the exploitation of nature

Breathing for speech entails the voicing of a suitable number of syllables, with each outward (expiratory) breath which leaves our lungs

The pursuit of fluency as a goal is often frowned upon, in the stuttering self-help movement

April 29, 2022 Twitter thread from Will Stancil addresses changes in visibility in politics or culture of women and people of color