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
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
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language. — 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
“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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just… — 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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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 Image
Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
