Book Review: The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker. Viking, 2007

While accessible to the general reading public, this book is not a quick, easy read. While written in an engaging style, it's dense with linguistic terms that most of us aren't used to thinking about every day. What Pinker presents is a fascinating look into what the way we talk tells us about how we think and what we value.

Being a nine year old at heart, I first skipped ahead to the chapter called "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television"- the linguistics of swearing. Turns out that the words we consider taboo say a lot about our society. Communities where religion is a strong force find taking the deities name to be much worse than words for excrement or sex; in other places, religious swearing is goes almost unnoticed and excrement and sex words are taboo. In the past in English speaking areas, the religious swearing was taboo and words for sex and female sexual parts were in common usage; today the opposite holds, although certain sex words are pretty much considered harmless and even young kids use terms like 'that sucks' routinely. Society is changing.

Pinker spends a lot of time discusses the debate on how language arises. There is one theory that says that all language is preinstalled in the brain, which didn't make sense to me even before Pinker tore it apart. How could a baby be born with every possible word already in their mind, when many were born before the thing the word is for was invented? Are the words in there, just waiting for the invention so they can be used? Was the word 'bicycle' waiting for thousands of years, hiding in the depths of the gray matter? I don't think so. Some of Pinker's linguistic theories may be controversial, but I don't see how this one is.