Look at almost any passage and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works. Rather than occasionally reaching for a metaphor to communicate, to a very large extent communication is the use of metaphor. It could be that 95 per cent of our speech is metaphorical, if you go back far enough in language.
—The Toronto Star, January 21, 2007

Posted on January 22, 2007

Shifts in terms have an unfortunate side effect. Many people who don't have a drop of malice or prejudice but happen to be older or distant from university, media and government spheres find themselves tainted as bigots for innocently using passe terms such as "Oriental" or "crippled." Arbiters of the changing linguistic fashions must ask themselves whether this stigmatization is really what they set out to accomplish.
—The New York Times, April 5, 1994

Posted on December 7, 1999

Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been studied...These concepts and relations appear to be the vocabulary and syntax of mentalese, the language of thought.
—How the Mind Works, 1997

Posted on May 15, 2000

When a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.
—The Language Instinct, 1994

Posted on November 6, 2000

Even the most onomatopoeic words — those for animal sounds — are notoriously unpredictable, with pigs oinking boo-boo in Japan and dogs barking gong-gong in Indonesia. Sound symbolism, for its part, was no friend of the American woman in the throes of labor who overheard what struck her as the most beautiful word in the English language and named her newborn daughter Meconium, the medical term for fetal excrement.
—Words and Rules, 1999

Posted on June 27, 2000

The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, English teachers, essayists, columnists, and pundits ... William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for The New York Times Magazine, call himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group. To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! Kibbitzers and nudniks is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since ... The rules conform neither to logic nor to tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible.
—The Language Instinct, 1994

Posted on August 9, 2000

Differences among languages, like differences among species, are the effects of ... processes acting over long spans of time. One process is variation — mutation, in the case of species; linguistic innovation, in the case of languages.
—The Language Instinct, 1994

Posted on August 18, 1998

Irregularity in grammar seems like the epitome of human eccentricity and quirkiness.
—The Language Instinct, 1994

Posted on November 9, 1998

People can be forgiven for overrating language. Words make noise, or sit on a page, for all to hear and see. Thoughts are trapped inside the head of the thinker. To know what someone else is thinking, or to talk to each other about the nature of thinking, we have to use — what else, words! It is no wonder that many commentators have trouble even conceiving of thought without words — or is it that they just donšt have the language to talk about it?
—The Language Instinct, 1994

Posted on May 20, 1998

The Watergate tapes are the most famous and extensive transcripts of real-life speech ever published. When they were released, Americans were shocked, though not all for the same reason. ... One thing that surprised everyone was what ordinary conversation looks like when it is written down verbatim.
—The Language Instinct, 1994

Posted on June 19, 1998

The workings of language are as far from our awareness as the rationale for egg-laying is from the fly's.
—The Language Instinct, 1994

Posted on June 17, 1999

A sentence parser requires many kinds of memory, but the most obvious is the one for incomplete phrases, the remembrance of things parsed.
—The Language Instinct, 1994

Posted on December 8, 1998

A word, in a word, is complicated.
—The Language Instinct, 1994

Posted on January 9, 1999

I have never met a person who is not interested in language.
—The Language Instinct, 1994

Posted on May 9, 2002

The idea that the human mind is designed to use abstract variables and data structures used to be, and in some circles still is, a shocking and revolutionary claim, because the structures have no direct counterpart in the child's experience. Some of the organization of grammar would have to be there from the start, part of the language-learning mechanism that allows children to make sense out of the noises they hear from their parents. The details of syntax have figured prominently in the history of psychology, because they are a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind.
—The Language Instinct, 1994

Posted on December 18, 2001