I did lots of cool stuff in the Czech Republic. But one of the last things I did within its borders was look at the back of an airplane seat and try to deduce Czech grammatical rules, with the help of my knowledge of Latin (the closer to PIE, the better), NACLO-honed logic skills, and the little messages saying things like “Fasten your seat belt while seated.”
If that sounds like how you might spend your final minutes in a foreign country, I highly recommend Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought.
Furthermore, if you enjoy learning Latin or taking the NACLO exam, I highly recommend The Stuff of Thought to you too.
If you do not want to see the Declaration of Independence, the dative case, and the meaning of “If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome” irreverently and unflinchingly dissected, stay far, far away. But if you fall into this category, I invite you to reconsider your stance, for Pinker has convinced me that such a dissection can be a fascinating and illuminating exploration into human thought: our views of space and time, causality and relationships, objects and concepts.
For instance, he begins his chapter on the ubiquity of metaphor by analyzing literally every word and phrase in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, resulting in the following summary:
So if language is our guide, the lofty declaration of abstract principles is really a story with a strange and clunky plot. Some people are hanging beneath some other people, connected by cords. As stuff flows by, something forces the lower people to cut the cords and stand beside the upper people, which is what the rules require. They see some onlookers, and clear away the onlookers’ view of what forced them to do the cutting.
I shan’t steal his thunder by talking any more about it (besides, he does a much better job), but suffice it to say that his analyses like this one have changed– if only temporarily– the way I think about words.
Basically, that is, there is a disconcerting trend towards increased obsession with verbal precision, which I know my mom at least has noticed from my harping on tenses and the comparative. But once you’ve read about it in this book, there is just something so alluring about the subtle but certain conceptual difference between “load hay into the wagon” and “load the wagon with hay.” And it starts bothering you that other unenlightened people don’t seem to appreciate this.
By far the most entertaining chapter is the one on swearing. The whole book is written in an enjoyable and humorous manner, but I definitely remember sitting in Green Star one day and being actually unable to stop laughing about the scholarly way Pinker was studying the semantics of totally filthy language.
So, if for no other reason, read this book for his musings on how you can say both “That was very brilliant” and “That was fucking brilliant”– but while you may say “How brilliant was it? Very,” you will never say “How brilliant was it? Fucking.”
Tags: books, fucking brilliant, language, psychology, review
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