Looking in detail at words that "treat people as things, and things as people, and do so at that strange space where joking, ridiculing, demeaning, oppressing, resisting, and regretting converge," Household Words is a study of how certain words act as indices of political and social change, perpetuating anxieties and prejudices even as those ways of thinking have been seemingly resolved or overcome by history.

Specifically, Stephanie A. Smith examines six words--bloomer, sucker, bombshell, scab, nigger, and cyber--and explores how these words with their contemporary...