Oikos Domus Household: The Many Lives of a Common Word describes historic episodes in the lives of these words, from the Greek oikos and Roman domus to our current family and home. The episodes highlight their function as controlling metaphors used very differently from culture to culture, but often as ways to control basic issues, like the context in which women become pregnant and the control of land and its transmission to heirs. This book also describes how these words and their current equivalents, home and family, are used as metaphors to illustrate how people who count are...

This book by David K. O Rourke presents a study of language and linguistic forms and the roles they played in the initial imagining, developing, and maintaining of a society based on coerced labor. It focuses especially on the contexts of coercion and on the differences in the roles of masters and servants from society to society. In the interaction between colonial powers and conquered peoples, O Rourke also describes how the European colonial nations imposed their own languages, social metaphors, and utopian views as a way to disconnect those they conquered from their historic roots and...