John Quincy Adams was one of only two Presidents in the nation's first half century not to own — the language of possession is inescapable — slaves; the other was his father, John.
But identifying knowledge of language with possession of an ability is at odds with how we speak.
The language of possession ranges from the Constitutional the NRA's staunch lobbying to maintain the Second Amendment right to bear arms to the rhetoric of the far-far-right.
Their intimacies are staged and anonymous, a sign language of self-possession and commonplace acts.
One of the ways Turkish authorities suppressed calls for Kurdish autonomy was to ban any expression of ethnic identity – that included the use of the Kurdish alphabet on public buildings and documents, a ban on the teaching of the Kurdish language and even possession of Kurdish music.
Maybe the relative reticence is a smart move; not looking rattled or scared is obviously a plus, and staying wryly amused by Trump's absurdity is plausible political body language – the smooth self-possession of movie stars is one way of delivering that mood.
Indeed, the robustness of the results from our scaling approach that used the common part of the context questionnaires indicates that for the purpose of obtaining plausible values the questions in those questionnaires could be reduced to a core set, such as gender, parental education and occupation, migration, home language, and home possessions.
This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality.
Every first-person narrator creates himself out of words, but this process is particularly acute in Bruno's case, since possession of language is the only thing that qualifies him for human consideration, especially after acts of violence for which he would otherwise be put down.
Beforehand we were told to pick a player to focus on and study aspects such as his body language when he lost possession rather than technical qualities.
The great masters of this technique (see also Mousterian industry) were the Neanderthals, whose possession of language has long been debated.
