THE FOLIO SOCIETY

These are the questions to which Steven Pinker (recently voted one of Time magazine’s 100 most important people in the world today) turns his remarkable insight and expertise. ‘I want to debauch your mind with learning...’ he declares, and goes on to do just that, covering every facet of the human language. From the ‘jabbering’ of Stone Age highlanders in New Guinea to the monosyllabic ‘you know, like’ teenage skateboarder; from babies ‘born talking’ to the ‘spooky similarities’ of twins, Pinker argues that language is not a cultural invention, learned by imitation, but rather a human instinct. As the spider knows how to spin a web, so we know how to talk.

How is it that we can perceive word breaks in sentences when the speaker leaves none, or read between the lines? Why do we ‘kick the bucket’, make Freudian slips, or say that we ‘sneezed’ and not ‘snoze’? Exploring child development, sign language, aphasia (the loss of language), ‘grammar genes’, syntax and the biological means by which we speak, Pinker draws on a wealth of scientific evidence as well as some of the finest writers of English prose: Dorothy Parker, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain ... Pinker’s subject, after all, underlies all that the intelligent reader enjoys: wordplay, poetry, wit, rhetoric and plain good writing.