On Reading Pinker's The Stuff of Thought
Although many things diverted my attention at various times, I have finally finished reading Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought : Language as a Window into Human Nature (New York : Viking, 2007, 499 pages). I enjoyed it, and I found it useful and enlightening. No doubt it's not for everyone, but it's engaging and entertaining writing about language, and some of us really go for that. There's more at my book note, of course.
As usual, I wanted to share a few excerpts and thoughts that seemed more appropriate for this more personal venue.
This first little excerpt refers to an interesting faux-paradox from metaphysics, and tells us something about human nature. (It also is something that came up in another book I finished a few days ago: What a Way to Go, a compendium of techniques for execution. No, really. Here's the book note for that.)
The final problem [for a conceptual theory of causation he's critiquing] is called overdetermination (or, sometimes, multiple sufficient causes). Consider a firing squad that dispatches the condemned man with perfectly synchronized shots. If the first shooter had not fired, the prisoner would still be dead, so under the counterfactual theory his shot didn't cause the death. But the same is true of the second shooter, the third, and son on, with the result that none of them can be said to have caused the prisoner's death. But that is just crazy. [p. 215]
This one is just because I found it witty:
And yet metaphor provides us with a way to eff the ineffable. [p. 277]
This is from a discussion of taboo and euphemism, a subject that always fascinates me, and because it points out that taboo words do change over time.
As with the rest of language, swearing can be called universal, though only with qualifications. Certainly the exact words and concepts considered taboo can vary across times and places. During the history of a language, we often see clean words turning [dirty — apparently the word was left out and the proofreader didn't notice!] and dirty words turning clean. Most English speakers today would be surprised to read in a medical textbook that "in women the neck of the bladder is short, and is made fast to the cunt," yet the Oxford English Dictionary cites this from a fifteenth-century source. In documenting such changes the historian Geoffrey Hughes has noted, "The days when the dandelion could be called the pissabed, a heron could be called a shitecrow and the windhover could be called the windfucker have passed away with the exuberant phallic advertisement of the codpiece. The changing fortunes of taboo words can buffet the reception of a work of literature. Huckleberry Finn for example, has been the target of repeated bans in American schools because nigger, though never a respectful term, is far more incendiary today than it was in the time and place in which Mark Twain wrote. [pp. 327-328]
Nearby, on p. 329, he quotes the business part of George Calin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television". I memorized this when it was available to me as an adolescent, and I can still say the string of words with admirable speed, but I'm happy to have the punctuation and a few words clarified:
Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, wow. Tits doesn't even belong on the list, you know. It's such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname. "Hey, Tits, come here. Tits, meet Toots, Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots." It sounds like a snack doesn't it? Yes, I know, it is, right. But I don't mean the sexist snack, i mean, New Nabisco Tits, The new Cheese Tits, and Corn Tits and Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits, Onion Tits, Tater Tits, yeah.
And then, this useful paragraph, given my interest in euphemism:
Taboo speech is part of a larger phenomenon known as word magic. Though one of the foundations of linguistics is that the pairing between a sound and a meaning is arbitrary, most humans intuitively believe otherwise. They treat the name for an entity as part of its essence, so that the mere act of uttering a name is seen as a way to impinge on its referent. Incantations, spells, prayers, and curses are ways that people try to affect the world through words, and taboos and euphemisms are ways that people try not to affect it. Even hardheaded materialists find themselves knocking wood after mentioning a hoped-for event, or inserting God forbid after mentioning a feared one, perhaps for the same reason that Niels Bohr [the famous physicist] hung a horseshoe above his door: "I hear that it works even if you don't believe in it." [p. 331]