Enjoyed as book on tape. Could read chapters as they interested me.

This was really interesting. The author is a professor of psychology at Harvard. He has written a number of other books about language and how it works. This one was about how language reflects how our brains work.
I felt like I really learned a lot about the ordering of language. The way he groups categories of nouns, verbs, etc. according to how they are used and how they can be formed into sentences makes much more sense than the traditional ways of organizing language that you find in a prescriptive grammar, or that we all learned in school. In fact, one of my lowest grades was in my required English grammar class at BYU.
I don't think I'm going to go into how cause and effect seems to be mirrored in language, and not just English, but many others. Mostly because I would have to read the book again in order to properly summarize it. So if you are interested, look this one up in your own library.
There was one point I really liked. He has a chapter discussing swearing; why, how, common themes among all languages. One point he made that I had wondered about was why swearing is so forceful and unpleasant. He said that when a person swears, he forces anyone in hearing range to think about something disgusting or extremely unpleasant. It is a means of social aggression, which is why young men, in the "swagger" phase, are notorious for using it. He also said something which I have thought for a long time, but he said it so nicely:

Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful about
where to aim it and when to fire. The common denominator of taboo words is
the act of forcing a disagreeable thought on someone, and it's worth considering
how often one really wants one's audience to be reminded of excrement, urine,
and exploitative sex. Even in its mildest form, intended only to keep the
listener's attention, the lazy use of profanity can feel like a series of jabs
in the ribs. They are annoying to the listener, and a confession by the
speaker that he can think of no other way to make his words worth attending
to. It's all the more damning for writers, who have the luxury of choosing
their words off-line from the half-million-word phantasmagoria of the English
lexicon. ( )

A continuation of his ideas from Blank Slate and Language Instinct. Pinker argues that the way we think shapes the way we express ourselves through language. We are all born with a basic framework for time, substance (that includes number sense), space and causation which are innate in our brain and which, in turn, give us the basic framework of how we think. Then, how we think dictates how we put ideas into words, with basic notions common to all humans and specific cultures filling in the details with new concepts and words.
Pinker makes interesting points about metaphors, obscenities and language games people play. Metaphors are quite ubiquitous in our communication as an expression of the spatial and causal way we think; we basically speak in them (e.g. Let's move the meeting to Friday.). Interestingly enough, we cannot completely control our reaction to swear words and profanities because we react to them (and use them alike) with the underlying, older, automatic and instinctive parts of the brain.
As usual, I enjoyed Pinker's super logical way of thinking and organizing information. ( )

This book earns quite the dubious distinction. It becomes the first one that I haven't at least skimmed through to the finish since I gave up on Ulysses about 20 years ago.

The problem is simple: Pinker is a terribly "loose" writer, which is poison in a book about language, and especially one that deals with semantics. The best (worst?) example of what I mean was this sentence, which is the one that caused me to finally give up on the book: "The most successful new corporation in this century so far is Google, which made its fortune by actually selling noun phrases."

In the text, Pinker italicizes "selling noun phrases," but I can't figure out how to do that here. And regardless, what I would emphasize is the word "actually." In my copy of Webster's, the word is defined as "as a matter of actual fact; really."

So, what Pinker has done here is akin to when people use the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" or "metaphorically." Because what Google is "actually" doing in Pinker's example is selling the right for companies to be listed at the top of a Google search page when people search for given combinations of words.

Google doesn't literally own any noun phrases to sell, and the companies that pay Google don't receive any kind of ownership in anything.

Turning a page or two, Pinker then starts a discussion about what he calls "count nouns" and "mass nouns." According to him we can "pluralize count nouns (two pebbles) but not mass nouns (*two gravels)."

(In the original, the material in the parentheses is in itals, and the asterisk indicates a "wrong" usage.)

Yet when one googles the word gravels, it's obvious that the plural IS widely in use, from book titles such as "Gems, Granites, and Gravels: Knowing and Using Rocks and Minerals" to the landscaping firm that notes "Sierra Nevada White Granite landscaping gravels create a distinct and natural contrast with your plants and other stone."

Now, I've read a few of Pinker's other books, so I know he's got some interesting insights into how the brain works with language, etc., etc. But, speaking as a professional writer myself, I consider this particular book an example of what happens when you get an author who doesn't understand that good, clear writing requires just as much expertise as neuroscience.

You can get away with that in some books, but not in one the very subject of which involves how people use language in the real world. ( )

Wow! What a great writer on this subject. This linguistics professor at Harvard has written many books on linguistics. This one asks the question, does language shape our brain. The answer seems to be that our brain structure shapes our thoughts and language and our individual culture shapes the particulars of the language.