Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers

(Zone Books) This book examines the fracturing of language from ancient times to the present, particularly in regard to artificial tongues: cryptic idioms and secret languages designed to cover crimes or record the divine. Heller-Roazen argues that willfully obscuring language depends on poetic techniques, which work to play sound and sense against each other. Heller-Roazen is a professor of comparative literature and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.