The World Wide Web

The Reith Lectures

• Episode: The World Wide Web
• Website: The Reith Lectures
• Feed URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9/episodes/downloads.rss
• Duration: 00:28:21
• Published: 1996-03-05 10:00

This year's Reith Lecturer is Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. In her fifth and final lecture, Professor Jean Aitchison looks at the possibilities and the pitfalls of the way we use language, and how it can shape as well as distort our view of the world. She examines how the huge choice of words and sentences available to us also sets up possible snares and how humans may be subconsciously trapped by their language.