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This article aims to connect three topics: Brexit, Boris and the decay of democracy. What connects this trio is talk, talk, talk. Language and politics are tightly and necessarily intertwined. Indeed, as the Greeks thought, language is intertwined with democracy itself. The twenty-first century has brought unprecedented complexity to human ways of communication, and yet the old rhetorical tricks and oratorical stunts, first described and practised in the ancient world, are still capable of turning heads. As we learn more about how human language works in social and political settings, we can see even more clearly a few of the factors that enable lying politicians to acquire power. But we are still far from drawing practical lessons that could be relevant to our current political crisis.

At the centre of populism is a problem of meaning. We could simply say it is a semiotic problem, but I would like to go further, and say that it's a cognitive problem, one intrinsic to the human nervous system. It is a characteristic of our species that becomes highly active and significant in group action at certain social and historical conjunctures. The problem is the meaning of the word people, which on most accounts is centrally important for making out what the phenomenon called "populism" is about. It is unhelpful to say the word is meaningless or vague, because clearly something is going on in the minds of its users and their hearers. That something is not simply about denoting an entity; it is about activating a mental effect.

De quelle manière un lien de causalité peut-il être établi au sein du triptyque constitué par les termes défense , identité et Europe ? Pour répondre à cette question, il faut envisager dans quelle mesure la construction d'une défense commune est le moteur ou le catalyseur de l'identité européenne. Pour ce faire, il est nécessaire d'étudier les conditions de la formation de l'identité et de les appliquer à la notion de défense. Il sera alors possible de déterminer les conditions – tant socio-historiques que cognitives – grâce auxquelles la conceptualisation de la défense correspond à celle de l'identité et, par conséquent, de mesurer comment la notion de défense pourrait contribuer à la genèse d'une identité européenne.

The role & responsibility of linguists & discourse analysts in the wake of the 11 Sept 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center & the Pentagon is addressed by examining the contexts being constructed to make sense of discourse & noting the prevalence of metonymic thinking on all sides. A context in which global penetration by American culture is perceived as tantamount to a military threat has been constructed by the attackers, for whom the attack on particular instances of American military & economic power stands metonymically for an attack on the whole; Americans in response activate pre-wired contexts that also involve metonymic & metaphoric patterns of discourse & thought, including analogies of war, WW2, polarization, revenge, police & outlaws, & the legitimation of targeting (eg, a metonymic mapping of the notion of perpetrator onto that of persons harboring the perpetrator). Adapted from the source document.