Word: linguistic
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Unhappiness seems to bind many of us too often. It's remarkable how many of our conversations here are what Georgetown socio-linguist Deborah Tannen would call "troubles talk," and what most of us fondly refer to as "venting." Even while attending the world's greatest university and being offered so many options and opportunities in every direction, many of us remain dissatisfied. Most Americans would give their right arms to enter this bastion of our misery...
...every word in a text. If they did and if they tried to translate what they saw into sounds, reading would be much too cumbersome. Somehow, though, children learned to read. To explain this, Smith adapted theories about the acquisition of oral language. In the mid-'60s the linguist Noam Chomsky had determined that a child's brain is actually wired with the rules of all spoken languages. Immersed in the world of speech, the child learns by experience which rules apply to the language of his community. Smith concluded that written language was acquired in the same fashion...
...because Pinker writes in the same breezy style that brightens his classroom lectures. He likes to quote Mae West ("Men like women with a past because they hope history will repeat itself") and Woody Allen ("I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics"), along with linguist Noam Chomsky, artificial-intelligence guru Marvin Minsky and, of course, Charles Darwin. Pinker has a showman's sense for knowing "when to hold his reader's attention with an illustration or a joke," observed University of Oxford zoologist Mark Ridley in the New York Times Book Review last week. "No other...
...subject from an entirely different perspective. The son of a traveling salesman, Pinker grew up in Montreal and attended McGill University, where he became fascinated with the psychology of perception and cognition. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard, then moved a few blocks down Massachusetts Avenue to M.I.T., linguist Chomsky's home base. Chomsky's seminal theory--that humans come into the world fully programmed for grammatical language--permeates Pinker's thinking. In his work, for example, Pinker tries to tease apart how the innate components of the language system interact with experience. "The past tense," he quips...
Flavored with Scandinavian touches sure to warm the heart of any hobby linguist, the Doktor's lyrics reek of appealingly awkward translation: we see the roots of "Holiday" in a two-word compound, as well as the enclitic "yes" or "no" tacked on at the end of a sentence for emphasis ("You can't look back, no, no/You must look forward...