philological

The book — each section of which opens with an epigram from Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” — eventually bogs down in philological digression.

One newly published account concludes that there was only an “appearance of dialogue” which failed to bridge the “abysmal philological and theological gaps” between the two camps.

English slang is a field rich for tillage, as Max Décharné proves in “Vulgar Tongues,” a triumph of philological research and mordant social commentary.

Though she had studied Italian for 20 years, as part of her “full immersion” into the Italian language, she now kept a kind of philological notebook, full of vocabulary, phrases, rules of grammar.

“When is this papyrological pantomime, this Keystone Coptic, this academic farce, this philological burlesque finally going to stop?”