Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks,” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Words let us say the things we want to say and also things we would be better off not having said. They… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor,… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“We hear speech as a string of separate words, but unlike the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Darwin concluded that language ability is “an instinctive tendency to acquire an art,” a design that is not peculiar to humans but… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children.… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots;… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic:… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content. — Steven Pinker Copy Share
The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock.… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
“The biblical story of the binding of Isaac shows that human sacrifice was far from unthinkable in the 1st millennium BCE. The Israelites boasted… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence,… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
“In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch.… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from… — Steven Pinker Copy Share
