This is a truly fascinating book, really putting in perspective for me how language is a window into human nature. It is packed with facts, stories, examples and pure knowledge. There is just a bit too much of it, and some of it is too scholarly for my taste. Pinker uses too much space to explain theories he dosn't support, and the reader is left wondering why. The language itself, ironically, is at times too complicated.
However, some of the chapters are true gems, lifechanging I would say... ( )

Steven Pinker really is an amazing writer: amazing for his ability to attract crank reviews for his books.

Let’s take KromesTomes’s review as our example: one star, with the main (or rather the only) criticism being that Pinker is a ‘terribly “loose” writer’.

Now, for me, this is strange. It is easy to disagree with some of Pinker’s ideas, as he takes a contentious stand in some of the most fundamental debates in philosophy, psychology and linguistics. His writing style is not normally so controversial – for a writer who likes to tackle the big issues, his prose is unusually lucid.

Most people have a stereotype of academic writing in their heads: they think it is dense and dull. Like many stereotypes, it has some truth to it – many academic papers are impenetrable even to specialists in the same field. Academic writing on language, strangely enough, suffers just as much as any other field. Steven Pinker’s writing definitely does not fall into this category – he tries to engage with the reader, to stir up and maintain interest. This is definitely a good idea, as linguistics can be a little dry – try Steven Ullmann’s Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning as bedtime reading.

So, Pinker uses “actually” in a way which is not recorded in Webster’s. Well, I have news (I’m whispering): sometimes people use words in ways which are different to those described in the dictionary. Sometimes they even use words which aren’t even in the dictionary! Imagine that! Actually (can I say that?), this use is in my dictionary (the Oxford): “used to emphasize that something someone has said or done is surprising”. Yet, this is beside the point, which is that it is not at all difficult to know exactly what Pinker meant when he wrote that sentence, just as I know what is meant by a “loose” writer. I’m sure no native speaker of English requires a dictionary to understand it.

Google doesn’t sell noun phrases? Well, it sells to companies wishing to advertise on their search engine the right to have their ads display when certain words, usually noun phrases, are entered into the search box by a user. As I have worked on Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Google in this arena, I know that it is common within the industry to speak of “buying and selling keywords”, rather than use a two or three dozen word sentence as I’ve just done. Not only does it save a lot of time in meetings, but this linguistic phenomenon also has a name: synecdoche. I’m sure that one’s in Webster’s.

One could pick holes in the English used in the review: some people would object to the comma placed inside the inverted commas in “selling noun phrases,” as this implies that it is part of the quote, or to the use of “but” at the start of a sentence. You might say this is pedantry – I would agree and I apologise – but picking holes in perfectly clear and understandable language (or “how people use language in the real world”) is not restricted to this or the below review. Indeed, Pinker devoted a whole chapter of The Language Instinct to linguistic prescriptivism (Chapter 12 – The Language Mavens).

Don’t get me started on the count nouns and mass nouns thing, as I wouldn’t want to keep you here for another ten minutes, although it’s, erm, actually really interesting.

Have a read – you’ll enjoy it, even if you don’t agree with it. No dictionary needed. ( )

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. ( )