It's all so enjoyable that one risks missing the paradox that this highly symbolic language, as indispensable to the process of marketing politicians as to selling consumer goods, is equally the syntax of manipulation and propaganda, the sine qua non of those 30-second commercials that have debased political discourse around the world.

WSJ: A Resounding Yes to No | A Good Day to Die Hard | Beautiful Creatures | Film Review by Joe Morgenstern

Like the Neanderthals, the newcomers had been busy, too, developing advanced tools and weapons, better navigational skills, trade, complex language, art and other forms of symbolic thinking.

WSJ: Neanderthals: Why Us and Not Them?

And though paleoanthropologists are coming around to the view that Neanderthals developed sophisticated ways to communicate, including some form of spoken language, they may have lacked the rich vocabulary or symbolic structure we take for granted today.

WSJ: Neanderthals: Why Us and Not Them?

In a symbolic move, Yanai declared earlier this year that English is Uniqlo's official corporate language.

WSJ: This Man Wants to Clothe the Planet | Renegade