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Human language is a miracle, whether it’s English or Chinese or Swahili. But for some humans, it’s just not good enough.

For hundreds of years, intrepid dreamers, visionaries, madmen and women, cranks and idealists have been inventing languages. Some for fun — Klingon. Some for world peace — Esperanto. Some for a good yarn — Tolkien’s “elvish.”

And a whole lot more for all kinds of reasons — Frendo, Glosa, Rikchik, Toki Pona. It is a magnificent, persistent obsession.

This hour, On Point: The history of invented languages, and why it never ends.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from Philadelphia is Arika Okrent, author of “In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language.” She has a joint Ph.D. from the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology’s Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Chicago — and she has earned her first-level certification in Klingon.

You can read excerpts from several chapters of the book.

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Every country, every culture has its proverbs — the old sayings, wise sayings, meant to capture a world of wisdom in a line. “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,” and all the rest.

Many are ancient. Some are brand new. “Garbage in, garbage out,” is a computer-era favorite.

Familiarity can breed contempt for proverbs. If your grandma kept saying “a penny saved is a penny earned,” you may be sick of it. Or you may be rich.

Look around the world — from Estonia to Zanzibar — and proverbs get interesting. My guest today, David Crystal, has collected proverbs from China, Congo, Scotland, Madagascar. They are telling in surprising ways. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson seems to be following the French Foreign Legion proverb this week: “When in doubt, gallop!”

This hour, On Point: Just when we need the wisdom, proverbs from all over the planet.

You can join the conversation. What proverbs were passed down in your family? What old, wise saying would you recommend to Washington, investors, Wall Street — all of us — right now?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from North Wales in the United Kingdom is David Crystal, a writer, editor, lecturer, and one of the world’s best-known commentators on language. He is honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales. His books include “The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language,” “By Hook or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English,” and “Shakespeare’s Words.” His new book, a whopping huge collection, is “As They Say in Zanzibar: Proverbial Wisdom From Around the world.”

Here’s an excerpt from “As They Say in Zanzibar,” with a generous sampling of proverbs collected by David Crystal.

When Ammon Shea set out on his great safari, his great odyssey, it wasn’t to the plains of Serengeti or the peak of Everest. Ammon Shea set out to conquer the Oxford English Dictionary — to read, in one year, all 21,730 pages.

At 137 pounds, the Oxford English Dictionary spans twenty volumes and 59 million words — with two and a half million quotations illuminating the deepest vaults of the English language.

At 155 pounds, our slender guest today, Ammon Shea, read every last one of them — nearly his weight in OED entries. That’s like reading a John Grisham novel a day for a year. And, says Shea, every bit as page turning.

Feeling “onomatomania”? Vexation at not finding the right word? He’s got you covered. Need a word for the place on your back you can’t reach to scratch? He’s got that too.

This hour, we’re reading the OED with author Ammon Shea, sailing far and wide on the ocean of the English language.

Have you plumbed the depths of the great dictionary behemoth? Or do you just dust off the dictionary to win at Scrabble? Do you know your acnestis from your petrichor? Join the conversation.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Ammon Shea joins us from New York. He’s the author of “Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, and 21,730 Pages” and co-author, with Peter Novobatzky, of two previous books on obscure words, “Depraved English” and “Insulting English.” He read his first dictionary, Merriam Webster’s Second International, ten years ago, and followed it up with the sequel, Webster’s Third International. Ammon has worked as a street musician in Paris, a gondolier in San Diego, and a furniture mover in New York City.

And joining us from New York is Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary. For the Third Edition of the OED, he has revised the words American, Big Apple, Indian, jazz, not!, prep, pretzel, punk, railroad, rap, Republican, and thousands of others. He’s author of “The F Word,” an exhaustive history of one of English’s most used words. From 1996 to 1999, he wrote a language column called “Jesse’s Word of the Day.”

More links:

Excerpt: “Reading the OED”
The Oxford University Press blog offers this excerpt from the book and an interview with Ammon Shea.

Oxford English Dictionary
The OED’s official site offers more about the dictionary, its history, and its ongoing revision program. And don’t miss the Word of the Day.

Front cover detail from BizzWords by Gregory Bergman.

Every walk of life has its lingo. Its buzzwords and catchphrases. American business has its own colorful menagerie of slang, and always has — from bulls and bears, to bootstraps, and 800-pound gorillas, and fish in a barrel.

But buzzwords and catchphrases change. They turn over and make way for newcomers.

And when they do, in American business, they may tell us something about where we and our economy are headed.

This hour, On Point: Matadors, multi-slacking, yottabytes and frazzing. We’re looking at the latest in American business buzzwords.

- Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guests:

• Gregory Bergman is author of “BizzWords: From Ad Creep to Zero Drag, a Guide to Today’s Emerging Vocabulary”

• Paul Hemp is senior editor at the Harvard Business Review

• Kara Swisher is technology columnist and co-host of D: All Things Digital for The Wall Street Journal.

Of the world’s seven thousand languages nearly half will disappear by the end of this century. Their extinction means the end of entire cultures, traditions, and histories.

K. Davis Harrison and Gregory Anderson are on a mission to save these dying languages. They’re linguists, but not the kind who spend their lives in libraries and classrooms.

They travel the world — from the Bolivian Andes to the steppes of Siberia — searching for the last speakers of native tongues. Think of them as action-adventure linguists with a cause.

This hour, On Point: the race to save vanishing languages.

-Anthony Brooks

Guests:

Greg Anderson, co-founder and director of Living Tongues: Institute for Endangered Languages, he teaches linguistics at the University of Oregon.

David Harrison, professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, author of “When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge,” and co-founder and director of research for Living Tongues: Institute for Endangered Languages.

Daniel Miller, co-founder of Ironbound Films and co-producer, co-director, and writer of the documentary film “The Linguists”