Looking Out To Sea

This blog post was written months ago, and I never got round to posting it because I was about to head off at a long and probably pointless tangent. In the interest of getting it out there I’ve removed the rambling at the end.

I finished Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought at the weekend. It is a good book, with plenty to make you think and even a bit to disagree with. But there’s always plenty to disagree with when people talk about grammar. And he is American, so there’s bound to be a few areas where our grammars do not overlap.

He goes to some effort to make sure you realise that, despite being a book about thought and language, it’s not a book about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Which is fair enough; Sapir-Whorf discussions get tedious quite quickly.

Instead he writes about what we can infer about our thoughts from how we speak, with particular mind to grammar and metaphors. He argues that there are certain fundamental states and actions which all of our words fall into — some words imply an active agent, some imply possession or transfer of possession, some imply contact while some work at a distance. This argument was interesting for the way it cuts across the groups of words we naturally think about. Words which seem connected (flow and pour) are completely different, while those with seemingly nothing in common operate similarly. (The way Steven Pinker describes the fundamental traits brought to mind the object/morphism talk of category theory. If only I knew more about either linguistics or category theory!)

The other important message of the book, as I mentioned, is metaphors. Having showed how we talk in terms of actions, movement and possession, Pinker then points out that most of the abstract and sophisticated speeech we use are metaphors based on physical counterparts. Once he points out (oh, there’s a metaphor, he didn’t point at anything did he?) that we talk in metaphors all the time it becomes a personal competition to phrase things neutrally. It’s difficult, let me tell you. Try it yourself.

I do recommend this book. I was given it for Christmas, as well as another slim book by Steven Pinker, which turned out to be a chapter from this one, extracted and published separately: The Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television. It’s about swearing, its cognitive effects and such. If you don’t feel up to reading the whole of The Stuff of Thought, this chapter works very effectively on its own. And who knows, you may start again on chapter one when you’ve finished.