‘Words, words, words.’ This was Hamlet’s reply to Polonius’ question, ‘What do you read, my lord?’ (Shakespeare, 1603) [1]. By repeating the word three times, Hamlet suggests that what he is reading is meaningless. Before launching the journal Archives of Public Health, we have asked ourselves: ‘Do we not already produce too many words too many journals?’ or in other words ‘What is the added va...

The aim of this paper is to call to attention a very large and important area of human factors engineering that is almost entirely neglected. This area consists of the language and the words that are attached to the tools, machines, systems, and operations with which human factors engineers are concerned. Examples, illustrations, and data are cited to show that changes in the words used in man-...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were employed to investigate whether recognition test items are processed differently according to whether they are used to probe memory for previously studied words or pictures. In each of two study-test blocks, subjects encoded a mixed list of words and pictures, and then performed a recognition memory task with words as the test items. In one block, the requir...