MALE SPEAKER: Steven Pinker is
a Johnstone family professor
of psychology at
Harvard University,
chair of the usage panel of the
American Heritage Dictionary,
and one of the world's
foremost writers
on language, mind,
and human nature.
His research has won prizes
from the National Academy
of Sciences, the Royal
Institution, of the American
Psychological Association,
and the Cognitive Neuroscience
Society.
He has also received
several teaching
awards and many
prizes for his books--
"The Language Instinct," "How
The Mind Works," "The Blank
Slate," and "The Better
Angels of our Nature:
Why Violence Has Declined."
He has been named
humanist of the year,
Time's 100 most influential
people in the world today,
and foreign policy world's
top 100 public intellectuals.
He has written for The New York
Times, Time Magazine, the New
Republic, the New Yorker,
and other publications
on consciousness, genomics,
morality, war and peace,
and of course, language.
Ladies and gentleman,
Steven Pinker.
[APPLAUSE]
STEVEN PINKER: Thank
you, [INAUDIBLE].
Why is so much writing so bad,
and how can we make it better?
Why do we have to
decipher so much legalese,
like "the revocation by these
regulations of a provision
previously revoked
subject savings does not
affect the continued
operations"?
Why is it so hard to understand
an academic article, like, "it
is the moment of
non-construction, disclosing
the abstention of
actuality from the concept,
in part through its invitation
to emphasize, in reading,
the helplessness of its
fall into conceptually"?
Why is it so hard to set the
time on a digital alarm clock?
[LAUGHTER]
Well there's no
shortage of theories,
and the most popular theory is
captured in this cartoon, where
the boss says to the
tech writer, good start,
needs more gibberish.
In other words, bad writing
is a deliberate choice.
Bureaucrats insist on gibberish
to evade responsibility.
Pasty-faced nerds
get their revenge
on the girls who turned them
down for dates in high school,
and the jocks how kicked
sand in their faces.
Pseudo-intellectuals try
to bamboozle their readers
with highfalutin' gobbledygook,
concealing the fact
that they have nothing to say.
Well I have no doubt that
the bamboozlement theory
is true of some writers,
some of the time.
But in my experience it
doesn't really ring true.
I know plenty of
scientists and scholars
who do groundbreaking
work on important topics,
they have no need to impress
and nothing to say-- still,
their writing stinks.
Good people can write bad prose.
The other theory
that is frequently
routed to explain bad
writing is that digital media
are to blame for
ruining the language.
I'm sure you've all seen this--
Google is Making Us Stupid.
The Dumbest Generation has been
stupefied by digital media,
and they are
jeopardizing our future.
Twitter is forcing us to think
and write in 140 characters.
Well I think there's some
problems with the dumbest
generation theory as well,
because it makes a prediction
that it must have
been very different
before the advent
of digital media.
Say-- And those of you who
were around in the 1980s
can surely remember
that back then teenagers
spoke in fluid paragraphs.
Bureaucrats wrote
in plain English,
and every academic
article is a masterpiece
in the art of the essay.
Yes, that's the way
it was in the 1980s.
Or was it the 1970s?
The truth is of course that bad
writing has burdened readers
in every era, such as 1961, in
which one commentator wrote,
recent graduates, including
those with university degrees,
seem to have no mastery
of the language at all.
Well maybe you have to go back
before the advent of television
and radio, say to 1917.
When someone wrote
from every college
in the country goes up the
cry, our freshman can't spell,
can't punctuate.
Every high school
is in disrepair,
because it's pupils are
so ignorant of the nearest
rudiments.
Well maybe you have to go
back to earlier centuries
when literacy was prized.
Well in 1785, they were
saying, our language
is degenerating very fast.
I began to fear that it will
be impossible to check it.
And then of course there are
the ancient grammar police,
like the commentator who
said, oh for crying out loud,
you never end a sentence
with a little birdie.
[LAUGHTER]
I think a better theory comes
from a observation by Charles
Darwin that man has an
instinctive tendency
to speak as we see in the
babel of our young children.
Whereas no child has an
instinctive tendency to bake,
brew, or write.
Speech is instinctive,
but writing
is, and always has been, hard.
Your readers are unknown,
invisible, and inscrutable.
They exist only in the
writer's imagination.
They can't react if
something is unclear,
break into the conversation
or ask for clarification.
So writing is an
act of pretense,
and writing is an
active craftsmanship.
Well, what can we do to
improve the craft of writing?
For many decades that
question had a single answer--
you hand students this.
The iconic Elements Of Style,
by Cornell professor William
Strunk, Jr., and his
former student, E.B. White,
also known as the New
Yorker essayist, and author
of "Charlotte's Web"
and "Stuart Little."
You will notice by the way that
the junior member of this pair
was born before the turn
of the century, that
is before the turn
of the 20th century.
There's no doubt
that there is plenty
of good sense in "The
Elements Of Style."
And it is well
worth consulting--
it has pithy, little
advisories such as use
definite, specific,
concrete language.
Write with nouns and verbs.
Put the emphatic words of
the sentence at the end.
And in another little gem
of self-exemplification,
omit needless words.
Which, indeed, omits
needless words.
On the other hand,
there are number
of reasons why "The
Elements Of Style" can't
be the sole basis of writing
advice in the 21st century.
For one thing, it's filled
with a lot of baffling advice.
Such as, the word,
people, is not
to be used with words of
number in place of persons.
That is, you may
not say six people.
Why not?
If, of six people,
five went away,
how many people would be left?
Answer, one people.
Did you follow that?
It would also rule out things
like three children, 32 teeth,
does not seem to
make much sense.
How's this?
To contact is vague and
self-important do not
contact people-- get
in touch with them,
look them up, phone them,
find them, or meet them.
Well yes, but what
if you don't care
how one person is going to
get in touch with another,
and what if it was just as
acceptable if they tweet them,
instant message them, email
them or any other medium?
The basis for this advice
was that the verb to contact
happened to be a neologism,
when White was a young man,
and so it graded on his ears.
In the many decades
since then, to contact
has become an unexceptionable
part of the language,
precisely because it
serves a need-- mainly,
sometimes you don't
care how one person is
going to get in touch with
another one unless you do so.
So you don't want to specify
phone them, meet them,
and so on.
Or how about this one?
Note that the word clever
means one thing when
applied to people, and other
would applied to horses.
A clever horse is a good-natured
one, not an ingenious one.
[LAUGHTER]
The problem with traditional
style advice is that it
consists of an arbitrary
list of Do's and Don'ts based
on the tastes and
peeves of the authors.
It is not based on a principle
understanding of how language
works, and as a
result, users have
no way of understanding and
assimilating the advice,
and much of the advice, as I'll
show you, is just plain wrong.
I think we can do better today.
We could base writing
advice on the science
and scholarship of language.
On modern grammatical
theory, which
is a marked advance over
the traditional Latin-based
grammars.
Evidence-based
dictionaries, and grammars.
Research in cognitive
science on what
makes sentences easy
or hard to read.
And historical and
critical studies of usage.
And this is what I've tried
to do in the sense of style.
It begins with a model
of effective prose.
As I mentioned, writing
is an unnatural act,
and good style, above all,
requires a mental model
of the communication scenario.
Who is the reader, and
what are you as a writer
trying to accomplish?
My favorite model of the
ideal communication scenario
comes from a wonderful
little book called
"Clear and Simple as the
Truth," by the literary scholars
from Francis-Noel Thomas,
and Mark Turner, who
outline a model of communication
they call classic style.
The model is that prose is
a window onto the world.
The writer sees
something in the world,
the reader has not
yet noticed it.
The writer positions the
reader so that the reader
can see it with her own eyes.
The writer and
reader are equals,
just that the writer
knows something
that the reader has
not yet noticed.
The goal is to help the reader
see an objective reality,
and the style is conversation.
Well this all sounds
pretty obvious.
What is non-classic style?
Well there are many
alternatives to classic style,
they-- Turner and Thomas
describe contemplative style,
oracular style, practical
style, and a number of others.
But the ones that academics
and other professionals
often write in is
a style they call
postmodern or self-conscious
in which the writer's
chief, if unstated concern
is to escape being convicted
of philosophical naivete
about his own enterprise.
They explain, "when
we open a cookbook,
we completely put
aside, and expect
the author to put aside
the kind of question that
leads to the heart of certain
philosophical traditions.
Is it possible to
talk about cooking?
Do eggs really exist?
Is food something about
which knowledge as possible?
Can anyone ever tell us
anything true about cooking?
Classic style,
similarly, puts aside
as inappropriate, philosophical
questions about its enterprise.
If it took these
questions up, it
could never get around
to treating its subject,
and its purpose is exclusively
to treat its subject."
And I believe that-- let
me-- since classic prose
is about showing
something to the reader,
it's only fair that I show you
an example of classic prose.
So here's an example from
an article in "Newsweek"
by the physicist Brian
Greene explaining
the theory of
inflationary cosmology,
and one of its implications--
multiple universes,
or the multiverse.
Greene writes-- "If space
is now expanding, then
at ever earlier
times, the universe
must have been ever smaller.
At some moment in the
distant past, everything
we now see, the
ingredients responsible
for every planet, every star,
every galaxy, even space
itself, must been compressed
to an infinitesimal speck,
but then swelled outward,
evolving into the universe
as we know it."
The Big Bang theory was born.
Yet scientists were aware that
the Big Bang theory suffered
from a significant shortcoming.
Of all things, it
leaves out the bang.
Einstein's equations
do a wonderful job
of describing how the universe
evolved from a split second
after the bang,
but the equations
break down similar to the
error message returned
by a calculator when you try to
divide one by zero when applied
to the extreme environment of
the universe's earliest moment.
The Big Bang thus
provides no insight
into what might have
powered the bang itself.
Now this covers some pretty
sophisticated physics,
and abstruse mathematics, but
Greene presents it in a way
that you can see everything for
yourself in your mind's eye.
If you know that
space is expanding,
then you can mentally
play the movie in reverse,
and extrapolate back to the
singularity at which space
was infinitesimally small,
and imagine it then,
the movie, going
forward, in return.
The abstruse concept of
an equation breaking down
can be appreciated by the
reader either by pulling out
a calculator and
dividing one by zero,
and sure enough, your calculator
will give you an error message.
Or, you could
even-- the reader is
welcome to try to imagine
what it could possibly
mean for one to be
divided into zero
parts, or some number of
parts, each of which was zero.
And so the reader
can see for herself
exactly what Greene
is trying to show.
I believe that many examples
of good writing advice
are implications of the
model of communication
behind classic prose.
For example, the
focus of good writing
should be on thing
being shown, not
on the activity of studying it.
The following is-- that
is, the writer's job, peer
group, daily
activities, and so on.
Now I am daily-faced with
reading papers and articles
that begin in the following way.
"In recent years, an increasing
number of researchers
have turned their attention to
the problem of child language
acquisition.
In this article recent
theories of this process
will be reviewed."
Well, no offense, but
not a whole lot of people
are really interested in how
professors spend their time.
A classic way of introducing
an article on the same topic
would be, "All children
acquire the ability
to speak and
understand a language
without explicit lessons, how
do they accomplish this feat?"
A corollary is to minimize
the kind of apologizing
that suffuses academic prose.
Again, this should
be all too familiar
to those of you who have read
academic review articles.
"The problem of
language acquisition
is extremely complex.
It is difficult to give
precise definitions
of the concept of 'language'
and the concept of 'acquisition'
and the concept of children.
There's much uncertainty
about the interpretation
of experimental data, and
a great deal of controversy
surrounding the theories.
More research needs to be done."
Well, classic prose
gives the reader credit
for being smart enough to
know that many concepts are
hard to define, and
many controversies
are hard to resolve.
The reader is there to
see what the writer is
going to do about it.
Another corollary of the
model behind classic prose
is to minimize the
kind of hedging
that professional writers are
apt to indulge in, where they
drizzle their prose with
mushy little qualifiers.
Like-- somewhat, fairly, nearly,
seemingly, in part, relatively,
comparatively, predominately,
to some extent, so to speak,
and presumably.
And the similar
device using shutter
quotes, to imply that
they don't really
mean what they are saying.
I'll give you an example from
a letter of recommendation
that I received.
She is a quote
"quick study" and has
been able to educate herself
in virtually any area that
interests her.
Well are we to understand this
as meaning that this young
woman is a quick study, or
that she is a quick study,
namely someone who is kind
of rumored or alleged to be
a quick study, but maybe isn't.
And what is that
virtually doing?
Is it that there are some areas
in which-- that interest her
where she just never
bothered to educate herself,
or was unsuccessful in doing so.
The use of hedges has become
so reflexive in professionals
and academics that at
one point I approached
a distinguished
scientist and I asked her
how she was and she
pulled out a picture
of her four-year-old
daughter and she said,
we virtually adore her.
Aw.
Why the compulsive hedging?
Well there is a saying
among bureaucrats
that you must always follow
the imperative CYA, Cover Your
Anatomy.
[LAUGHTER]
And there is an alternative--
namely, "So sue me!"
That is, it's often better to
be clear and wrong, than fuzzy,
and as the physicists
say, not even wrong.
Even when you don't, one can
count on the cooperative nature
of ordinary conversation to
avoid unnecessary hedges.
If someone says that they
are moving away from Seattle
because it's a rainy
city, you understand them
not as implying that it
rains there 24 hours a day,
seven days a week,
52 weeks a year.
But just that is
relatively rainy,
and she didn't have
to actually say,
Seattle is a relatively
rainy city for you
to understand it in that way.
Another implication
of classic prose
is that since it is
a window, the writer
must work to keep
up the illusion
that the reader is
seeing the world,
rather than just
listening to verbiage.
And for that reason, it is
imperative to, as they say,
avoid cliches like the plague.
You're all familiar with
the kind of writer who
dispenses verbiage
like this, "We needed
to get the ball rolling in
our search for the holy grail,
but found that it was neither a
magic bullet, nor a slam dunk.
So we rolled with
the punches, and let
the chips fall where
they may, while seeing
the glasses half full.
Which is easier said than done.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Don't
they turn a corner?
STEVEN PINKER: Pardon me?
Or, of course, they turned
a corner, absolutely yes.
At the leading edge, after they
found the low-hanging fruit.
If you just ladle out
one cliche after another,
either your reader will simply
shut down their visual cortex,
or if they keep
it awake they will
get derailed by the
inevitable mixed metaphors.
Like this one from another
letter of recommendation.
"Jeff is a renaissance
men, drilling down
to the core issues and
pushing the envelope."
Not clear how you can do
both at the same time.
No one has yet
invented a condom that
will knock people's socks off.
And you may also be eligible
for membership in an AWFUL--
Americans who figuratively
use literally.
Now it's OK to say
she literally blushed,
it's a little more problematic
to say she literally exploded.
And it's very, very bad to say
she literally emasculated him.
Classic prose is about
the world, not about
the conceptual tools with
which we understand the world.
And so classic prose,
avoids meta concepts,
namely concepts about concepts.
Like approach, assumption,
concept, condition, context,
framework, issue, level, model,
perspective, process, role,
strategy, tendency, variable.
And admit it, haven't you
seen these words a lot
in professional prose?
For example.
This is from a lawyer--
a legal scholar writing
in "The New York Times."
I have serious
doubts that trying
to amend the Constitution
would work on an actual level.
On the aspirational level,
a constitutional amendment
strategy may be more valuable.
In other words, I
doubt that trying
to amend the Constitution
would actually succeed,
but it may be valuable
to aspire to it.
Or, it's important to
approach the subject
from a variety of strategies,
including mental health
assistance, but also from a
law-enforcement perspective.
That is we need to
consult psychiatrists,
but we also may have
to inform the police.
Classic prose narrates
ongoing events,
we see agents performing
actions that affect objects
just as we do when an
event unfolds in real life.
Non-classic prose tends
to thing-ify events
and then refer to them
rather than narrating them
in real time.
And there is a dangerous
rule of English grammar
that makes this all too
easy called nominalization.
Where you take a
perfectly spry verb,
and you entomb it as a noun.
So instead of appearing,
someone makes an appearance.
Instead of organizing
something, you
bring about the
organization of it.
Helen Sword, an English scholar,
refers to them as zombie nouns
because they kind of
lumber across the stage
without any conscious
agent actually directing
their motion.
And turgid professional prose
is full of nominalizations
like, "prevention
of neurogenesis,
diminished social avoidance."
Meaning when we
prevented neurogenesis,
the mice no longer
avoided other mice.
"Subjects were tested
under conditions
of good to excellent
acoustic isolation."
To which, "We tested the
students in a quiet room."
Now the use of meta concepts,
and nominalizations-- it almost
defines the stereotype
of "academese"
in the public imagination.
As in this editorial cartoon
by Tom Toles, in which he shows
an academician
explaining the reason
that verbal SAT scores
are at an all time low.
"Incomplete implementation
of strategized
programmatics designated
to maximize acquisition
of awareness and utilization
of communication skills,
pursuant to standardize
review and assessment
of languaginal development."
Any interrogatory
verbalizations?
It isn't just academics
who use meta concepts
and nominalizations,
it's also politicians,
As when Rick Perry-- when
the Republican National
Convention was threatened
by a hurricane,
said, "Right now there
is not any anticipation
that there will be
a cancellation."
In other words,
"Right now we don't
anticipate that we will
have to cancel it."
And corporate consultants,
a man explained
to a reporter what
he did for living,
he said, "I'm a digital and
social media strategist,
I deliver programs,
products, and strategies
to our corporate clients across
the spectrum of communications
functions."
The reporter kept pressing
him as to what that meant.
And finally he said,
"I teach big companies
how to use Facebook."
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Yeah, thank you!
STEVEN PINKER: And
product engineers.
Portable generators used to
have the warning sticker that
said, "mild exposure
to CO can result
in accumulated damage over time.
Extreme exposure
to CO may rapidly
be fatal without producing
significant warning symptoms."
Yeah, Yeah.
And what began to happen is
that every year, several people
asphyxiated themselves
and their families
by running them indoors.
And so they changed
the sticker to read,
using a generator indoors
can kill you in minutes.
[LAUGHTER]
STEVEN PINKER: So classic
prose is literally
a matter of life and death.
Yes, literally.
OK, so how does understanding
the design of language lead
to better writing advice,
as I promised at the outset?
Well another contributor
to zombie prose,
is the passive voice.
The difference between
the dog bit the man
in the active voice,
and the men was
bitten by the dog in
the passive voice.
And it's well known
that the passive voice
is overused by academics.
"On the basis of
the analysis which
was made of the data
which were collected
it is suggested that the null
hypothesis can be rejected."
And by lawyers, "If
the outstanding balance
is prepaid in full, the
unearned finance charge
will be refunded."
And political officials, this
is the recently ex-director
of the Secret Service, who
in explaining to Congress how
it was that an armed men managed
to vault the fence of the White
House, sprint across
the lawn, and now waltz
into the White House.
She admitted,
"Mistakes were made."
What linguists call
the evasive passive.
And not surprisingly, all
the classic style manuals
warn writers away from
the passive voice.
As Strunk and White advised,
"Use the active voice.
The active voice is usually
more direct and vigorous
than the passive.
Many a tame sentence can
be made lively and emphatic
by substituting a transitive
in the active voice
for some perfunctory expression
as there is or could be heard."
And do you notice something a
little odd about this advice?
Yes, it uses the
passive voice to advise
against the passive voice.
George Orwell, in
the other classic bit
of writing advice that is handed
out to every college freshman
also advises against
using the passive.
He notes that, "A
mixture of vagueness
and sheer incompetence is the
most marked characteristic
of modern English prose.
I list below various
of the tricks
by means of which the
work of prose construction
is habitually dodged.
The passive voice is wherever
possible used in preference
to the active, a bit of
advice that has not one,
but two passives to warn
readers away from the passive.
Well this self-contradiction
tells us something.
The passive could not survive
in the English language
for centuries if it did
not serve some purpose.
Why can't we do without it?
The answer comes down to
the very design of language.
You can think of
language as an app
for converting a
web of knowledge
into a string of words.
Now cognitive psychologists
model a person's knowledge
as a semantic network, a kind
of mind-wide web, where there
are nodes that
correspond to concepts
and there are connectors,
or links, or relationships,
that stand for logical and
conceptual relationships
among them.
So this is a tiny and
simplified fragment
of a semantic network that
captures a person's knowledge
of the tragic story brought to
life by Sophocles in "Oedipus
Rex."
Now what happens when
you have to communicate
a bit of your knowledge
to another person?
Well you have to convert
it into a sentence.
What is a sentence?
It is a linear string of words.
Such as, in Sophocles play,
Oedipus married his mother,
and killed his father.
One word after another.
Well this linearization of
this high-dimensional web
means that language is saddled
with an inherent problem.
The ordering of
words in a sentence
has to do two things at once.
It has to serve as
a code for meaning,
signaling to the reader
who did what to whom,
but it also necessarily presents
some bits of information
to the reader before
others, and thus affects
how the information is absorbed
into the reader's mind.
In particular the earlier
material in the sentence
naturally pertains to the topic,
what the sentence is about,
what the reader is in
effect already looking at.
The later material is the focus
or focal point of the sentence,
and it's what the reader
should now notice.
Any prose that violates
these principles will feel,
as we say, choppy.
Or disjointed, or incoherent.
So this now helps us
understand the main function
of the passive, it
allows writers to they
the same semantic information,
namely the same information
about who did what to whom but
with a different surface order.
That is it allows the writer
start with the done-to
rather than with the do-er.
Which is why avoid the
passive is bad advice.
The passive is the
better construction
when the done-to is currently
the focus of the reader's
mental gaze.
And let me give you an example.
This is a passage taken
from the Wikipedia entry
for "Oedipus Rex" which
describes the climactic scene
in which the awful truth
behind the Oedipus story
is brought to light-- spoiler
alert, and here's how it reads.
Describing--
narrating this scene.
"A messenger arrives
from Corinth.
It emerges that he was formerly
a shepherd on Mount Kithaeron,
and during that time
he was given a baby.
The baby, he says,
was given to him
by another shepherd
from the Laius
household who had been told
to get rid of the child."
Now notice that this passage
has three passes in a row.
First, all eyes are
all the messenger.
The passage begins,
a messenger arrives.
So we're looking
at the messenger.
It's natural then
to use the passive
and say, "He was given a baby."
Well now our attention
is focused on the baby,
so you start the next
sentence with the baby,
and that will require that
it be in the passive voice.
"The baby was given to the
messenger by another shepherd."
Hey, another shepherd.
Now we're looking at
the other shepherd,
so it's natural that
the next sentence begins
with the shepherd.
"The other shepherd
had been told to get
rid of the child."
So it's a coherent passage
where the anonymous writer has
kept in mind where the
reader's mental gaze is
directed at every stage.
Now imagine that he
had followed the advice
to convert the passage
to the active voice.
The passage would
read as follows,
"A messenger arrives
from Corinth.
It emerges that he was formally
a shepherd on mount Kithaeron,
and during that time
someone gave him a baby.
Another shepherd from
the Laius household,
he says, whom someone had
told to get rid of a child,
gave the baby to him.
Now that is much
harder to follow,
because your characters
are parachuting in,
in a order that
doesn't correspond
to the natural order of
gaze from one to another.
More generally, English
syntax provides a writers
with constructions that
vary the order in the string
while preserving meaning.
Oedipus killed Laius.
Laius was killed by Oedipus.
It was Laius whom
Oedipus killed.
It was Oedipus who killed Laius.
And so on.
And writers must
choose the construction
that introduces ideas to the
reader in the order in which
she can most naturally
absorbed them.
Well this brings us back to
the original question of,
why is the passive so common in
bad writing given that there's
some circumstances in
which the better choice?
Well it's because
good writers narrate
a story that are
advanced by protagonists
who make things happen.
Bad writers work backwards
from their own knowledge,
writing down ideas in the order
in which they occur to them.
They know how the
story turned out,
so they begin with
the outcome, and then
they throw in the cause
as an afterthought
and indeed the passive voice
makes that all too easy.
Part three, why do writers
fall into that trap?
Why is it so hard for
writers to use language
to convey ideas effectively?
My favorite explanation is
a psychological phenomenon
that has been called
The Curse of Knowledge.
The inability that we
all have to imagine
what it's like for someone
else not to know something
that you do know.
Psychologists also call it
Mind Blindness, Ego-centrism,
and Hindsight Bias.
The classic illustration
is a experiment
taught to every
psychology student.
A child comes into a lab, the
experimenter hands the boy,
a three-year-old boy an
M&Ms box, he opens it,
and he's surprised to
find ribbons inside.
So you stuff the ribbons back
into the box, close it back up,
put it back on the table.
Now he watches as
a second comes in.
We'll call him Jason.
And you say to the
first boy, what
is Jason think is in the box?
And the boy says, ribbons.
Even though Jason has no
way of knowing that the box
contains ribbons.
He's just walked into the
room for the first time.
In fact, if you
say the boy, what
did you think was in the box
when you came into the room?
And the child will say, ribbons.
Now that he knows
what the box contains
he could no longer entertain the
original mental state in which
he did not know
what was in the box
or the mental state of
a naive third party.
Now we adults grow out of this
limitation-- kind of, a bit.
Because many studies have
shown that adults to,
are apt to project their own
knowledge on to everyone else.
If you give students
a list of words
and you ask them which
words are likely to be
in the vocabulary of
your fellow students,
they will guest at
the ones that they
know are the ones that
other students will know,
ditto with factual knowledge.
If you have people who
vary in their familiarity
with the gadget, such
as a cell phone and you
ask them to estimate how long it
will take someone else to learn
how to use the cellphone.
The more adept you
are at using it,
the less time you think
it'll take other people
to learn to use it-- because it
just seems so obvious to you.
I believe that the
Curse of Knowledge
is the chief contributor
to opaque writing.
It simply doesn't
occur to the writer
that the readers haven't
learned the jargon, don't
know the intermediate
steps that to the writer
seem too obvious to mention.
They can't visualize
a scene, that
in the writer's mind's
eye, is as clear as day.
And so the writer doesn't
bother to explain the jargon,
or to spell out the logic, or
to supply the concrete details
that allow the scene
to be visualized.
Just to give you
an example, here
is a passage of prose from a
review article in a journal
called "Trends in
Cognitive Science"
that is meant to be
read by a wide audience
of cognitive scientists
such as myself.
I read it, and I had no idea
what they were talking about.
And here's the passage.
It's from an article
on consciousness.
"The Slow and integrative
nature of conscious perception
is confirmed behaviorally by
observations such as the rabbit
illusion, and its
variants, where
the way in which a stimulus
is ultimately perceived
is influenced by
poststimulus events
arising several
hundreds of milliseconds
after the original stimulus.
Well the writer has
clearly expected
that every reader would know
what the rabbit pollution is,
but I've been in this
business nearly 40 years,
and I've never heard of it.
Nor was it clear what
the rest of the passage
meant, what a stimulus was,
what does the way in which
a stimulus is perceived
mean, and so on.
So I did a bit of digging,
went to my books on my shelf,
and I found that there
is such a thing called
the cutaneous rabbit solution
that works as follows.
If someone closes
their eyes then
someone else taps them three
times on the wrist, three times
of the elbow, three
times on the shoulder.
It feels like the series
of taps running up
the length of your arm, kind
of like a hopping rabbit.
The significance is where you
perceive the early taps depends
on the later taps, so
consciousness doesn't simply
track events in real time, but
it retrospectively edits them
so the way in which you
perceive the tap on the elbow
affects where you perceive
the tap on the wrist.
Well that's kind of
interesting, but why didn't they
just say that?
Instead of stimulus this,
and poststimulus that?
It would've taken no
more words, and it
would have been more scientific,
rather than less scientific,
because now a reader has a way
of evaluating the argument.
Does that really show
that conscious perception
is slow and integrative,
or might there
be some alternative explanation?
The dangers of the Curse
of Knowledge, for me,
are best-illustrated
by an old joke.
Where a man walks
into the dining room
one of the old
Catskills resorts.
And he sees it bunch of
retired Borscht Belt comedians,
sitting around a table.
He joins them, and
listens to what's going.
And one of the old
timers says, 37.
And everyone else erupts
in uproarious laughter.
Another one says, 112,
again, peels of guffaws.
I can't figure out
what's going on,
so he asked the guy next to
him, what's happening here?
Guys as well get these guys have
been around each other so long
but they all know
the same jokes,
so to save time they've
given each joke a number.
And now, when they want to tell
a joke, all they have to do
is recite the number.
Guys says, that's
ingenious, let me try it.
So he says, 121.
Stony silence.
27.
Then everyone stares at
him, and no one laughs.
He sinks back down to his
seat, and he asks the guy
next to him, what
happened, what I do wrong?
The guy said, oh, it's
all in how you tell it.
But anyway, giving jokes
numbers is what all of us
do, all too often without
realizing that others have
no way of knowing
what they refer to.
Well how do you exercise
the Curse of Knowledge?
The traditional
solution is to always
keep in mind the reader
over your shoulder.
Remember who you
are writing for.
Well this is good
as far as it goes.
But it doesn't go terribly
far because psychologists
have shown that we're actually
not terribly good at guessing
other people's knowledge,
even when we try.
None of us is blessed with
the gift of clairvoyance,
and people are often
over-confident in their ability
to define the mental states
of other individuals.
But still, it's a start so
for what it's worth, hey,
I'm talking to you, your readers
know much less than you think
they do and unless you try very
hard to imagine what you know
that they don't know who you
are guaranteed to confuse them.
But a better way to deal
with the Curse of Knowledge
is to actually get a
real live other person,
show them a draft, and
see if they can follow it.
All too often, one will discover
that what's obvious to you,
is not obvious to anyone else.
You can also show
a draft to yourself
after some time has passed,
and it's no longer familiar.
If you're like me you
will find yourself saying,
that doesn't follow,
what did I mean by that?
And all too often,
who wrote this crap?
Most advice on writing
should be interpreted
not as advice on how to write
but as advice on how to revise,
something that you can
only realize once you have
enough distance from
the prose to recognize
your own curse of
knowledge and then
to apply all of your
cognitive efforts
on improving the clarity
of the prose itself.
Finally, how should we
think about correct usage?
The issue of language that
probably draws more attention
than all other writing
issues put together.
Now some usages
are clearly wrong.
When Cookie Monster
says, me want cookie,
the error is so obvious that
it's the basis of the humor
that even a preschool
child can appreciate.
Similarly, I Can
has Cheezburger,
if we did not recognize that
that was a grammatical error,
there would be nothing
funny to the extent
that there is anything
funny about lolcats
and similar internet memes.
[LAUGHTER]
"Is our children learning?"
This is so obviously
a grammatical error
that even President
George W Bush,
in a self-deprecating speech
called attention to it
as an error in making
fun of himself.
There are other usages though,
or alleged usage errors
that are not so clear.
And just to be bipartisan, in
1992 Bill Clinton while running
for president, had as
one of his taglines,
"Give Al Gore and I a chance
to bring America back."
The despised "between you and
I" error which language purists
pointed at the time
as a damning sign
of his linguistic ineptitude.
Another democratic
President, Barack Obama,
recently said "No
American should
live under a cloud
of suspicion just
because of what they look like."
The supposed
singular "they" error
in which the plural pronoun
they has a singular antecedent,
no American.
"To boldly go where no
man has gone before."
The infamous split infinitive.
"You think you lost your love.
Well I saw her yesterday.
It's you she's thinking of,
and she told me what to say."
The preposition at the
end of the sentence.
And then the urbane, suave,
sophisticated talk show host
from the 1970s, Dick Cavett, in
a recent article for "The New
York Times" describing what
it's like to go to his college
reunion said, "Checking
into the hotel
it was nice to see a few of my
old classmates in the lobby."
Any of you spot the
grammatical error in that one?
It is the dangling
participle for those of you
who went to school in
the 1960s or earlier.
Well contested issues
like this have given rise
to what journalist sometimes
called The Language
War between-- allegedly
between the prescriptivists,
and the descriptivists.
According to this,
construction on one side
there are people
who prescribe how
other people ought
to speak and write.
Their credo might be summarized
as follows, "Rules of usage
are objectively correct.
To obey them is to uphold
standards of excellence.
To flout them is to dumb
down literate culture,
degrade the language, and hasten
the decline of civilization."
On the other side are
the descriptivists,
who describe how people
do speak and write.
Their credo might be
that, "Rules of usage
are the secret handshake
of the ruling class.
The people should be liberated
to write however they please."
Well if this was
a genuine debate,
and I suspect it is not,
then the prescriptivists
should have said that
the Beatles lyrics should
have been "It's you of
whom she's thinking."
And the descriptivists
should insist
that there is nothing wrong
with, "I can has cheeseburger."
Well, this doesn't seem
to be a productive way
to analyze problems of usage.
And indeed, I think that
this is a false dichotomy.
We need a better way of
thinking about usage.
Well are rules of usage?
What does it mean
to say that I Can
has Cheezburger is a grammatical
error or for that matter,
give Al Gore and I a chance
to bring America back.
These rules, whatever
they are there
are not an objective fact
about the physical world
that a scientist could go out
and observe with instrument.
Nor are they theorems of logic
that a logician could prove.
Many people believe
that rules of usage
are stipulated by a governing
body, such as the editors
of dictionaries, and I can
speak with some authority
here to say that
this is not true.
I'm the chair of the usage
panel of the American Heritage
Dictionary and when I joined,
the first question I asked
of the dictionary's editors
was, how do you guys
decide what goes
in the dictionary?
And the answer was "We pay
attention to the way people use
words."
That is, when it
comes to English,
there's no one in charge.
The lunatics are
running the asylum.
So what then are
rules of usage given
that they are not objective
facts about the world,
logical truths, or stipulated
by a governing authority.
You can think of them as
tacit-evolving conventions.
Convention is a
way of doing things
that has no inherent
advantages other than the fact
that everyone else has agreed
to abide by them as well.
An obvious example
is paper currency,
why there's a green, rectangular
piece of paper have value?
It's because everyone else
thinks that it has value.
Why do we drive
on the right, not
because there's anything
superior about the right as
opposed to the
left, but there are
very good reasons to
drive on the same side
than everyone else
is driving on,
whichever side it happens to be.
There's a joke
about man commuting
to work who gets a cell
phone call from his wife.
She warns him, honey, I've
been listening to the radio,
you should be very careful.
There's a maniac on
the highway, he's
driving in the wrong
direction on the expressway.
And he says, one maniac?
There are 100s of them.
And the conventions
of usage are tacit,
that is they are not
legislated by a governing body,
say like the Rules Committee
of Major League Baseball.
But they emerge as
a rough consensus
within a virtual community
of careful writers
without any explicit
deliberation, agreement,
or legislation.
And it's an evolving
convention in that
that consensus may
change over time.
So should writers
follow the rules?
And the answer is, it depends.
Some rules simply extend the
logic of everyday grammar
to more complicated cases.
Why do we say that, "Is
our children learning?"
is grammatically incorrect?
Well, it is equivalent to
"Our children is learning,"
and everyone agrees that,
"Our children is learning."
is gramatically incorrect.
Similarly, "The impact of the
cuts have not been felt yet."
There, it's a little
harder to spot the error,
but when you simply take out the
intervening phrase of the cuts
you get, "The impact
have not been felt yet,"
and again it pops
out as an error.
The writer was misled by
the adjacent noun, cuts,
which is plural into
using a plural verb.
Whereas in fact the subject
of the sentence is, impact,
a few words upstream,
which is singular.
When you get rid of that
intervening phrase then
the violation pops out at you.
Now you all recognize the
notorious green wiggly line
of Microsoft's grammar checker.
Probably most of the
green wiggly lines
that you will discover
in your drafts
consist of errors
of number agreement
that you may fail to have
spot because the sentence is
inverted, or a few
words get in between.
But we can all agree that
these really are errors
and they really
should be avoided.
Also there are some
prescriptive rules
that make important
semantic distinctions.
Namely, if you are addressing
a literate leadership,
they may have different
interpretation
than the one you had in mind.
For example, the
word fulsome is not
a fancy synonym the word full.
If you were to thank someone
for the fulsome letter
that they sent you, would
not be praising them,
you would not be
praising yourself,
because fulsome
does not mean full,
it means insincere
or excessively
and insincerely flattering.
Likewise, simplistic is
not a fancy-schmancy way
of saying simple, simplistic
means overly or naively simple.
Fortuitous in the expectation
of most literate readers
is not another way
of saying fortunate.
And if someone is
meritorious, I advise you not
to call them meretritious.
If you're not sure why,
look it up in a dictionary.
In general, English does
not tolerate synonyms
that share the same root,
but vary in their suffixes,
and so one should
resist the temptation
to try to sound
posh on the cheap
by using a hoity-toity
version of a familiar word.
If you do, you might
elicit the reaction
that Vizzini did in
the Princess Bride
when he kept using the
word inconceivable to refer
to things that just happened.
You keep using that word.
I do not think it means
what you think it means.
On the other hand, not
every grammatical pet peeve,
or bit of folklore, or
dimly-remembered lesson
from Ms. Thistlebottom's
classroom
is a legitimate role of usage.
Many of the alleged roles in
fact violate grammatical logic,
are routinely flouted
by the best writers,
and have always been
flouted by the best writers.
An excellent example
being singular they.
In a recent rant in a
conservative magazine,
one language grump
argued that singular
they was an innovation brought
on by radical feminists,
and that we should
all try to insert
a gender neutral monstrosity
into the English language,
and that we should ignore
these radical feminists
and instead go back to the pure,
crystalline language of Jane
Austen.
Well a scholar named
Henry Churchyard
in an article called "Everyone
Loves Their Jane Austen"
actually went back to
the crystalline prose
of Jane Austen and found
that she used singular they
no fewer than 87 times.
So what's a writer to do?
How should a careful writer
distinguish legitimate rules
of usage from the bogus ones?
Well the answer is
unbelievably simple.
Look them up.
Look them up in a modern
dictionary or style guide.
Many sticklers and snoots
and peasants and peevers
assume that any rule
that they remember
will be backed up by the major
dictionaries and style manuals.
Whereas in fact,
these reference books,
which do pay close attention
to English as actually
used by competent writers are
the most adamant debunkers
of grammatical nonsense.
If you look up split infinitive
in the Merriam Webster
unabridged, for example,
here's what you will find.
"It's all right to
split an infinitive
in the interest of clarity.
Since clarity is the usual
reason for splitting,
this advice means
merely that you
can split them
whenever you need to."
And you'll get similar
device from American Heritage
Dictionary, the Encarta World
English Dictionary, the Random
House Dictionary, and so on.
Modern dictionaries
and style manuals
do not, in fact, ban
split infinitives,
singular they, prepositions at
the end of sentences and so on.
They represent the difference
between reasoned evidence based
usage advice versus kind of
smarty pants one-up-manship.
Also, correct usage should
be kept in perspective.
So I think it is well
worth keeping in mind
correct and incorrect usage.
It's the least important
part of good writing.
You can obey every rule
that has ever been rooted,
and you can still be
a wretched writer.
It is far less important
than classic style,
overcoming the
Curse of Knowledge.
To say nothing of
factual diligence,
and keeping ideas and
arguments coherent.
Also, even the
most irksome errors
are not signs of the
decline of the language.
And this is best captured
by an XKCD cartoon
by the now bestselling
author Randall
Munroe, in which he has a ghost
visiting a language purist
and says-- the
ghost says I bring
a cautionary vision
of things to come.
This is the future.
And this is the
future if you give up
the fight over the
world literally.
That is, they are
exactly the same.
So to sum up, I think
that modern linguistics
and cognitive science
provide better ways
of our enhancing our prose.
A model of prose communication,
namely classic style
in which language is a
window onto the world.
An understanding
of the way language
works, in particular
the way that it
must convert a web of thoughts
into a linear string of words.
A diagnosis of why good
prose is so hard to write,
namely the Curse of
Knowledge, and a way
to make sense of
rules of correct usage
as tacit, evolving conventions.
Thank you very much.
Any interrogatory
verbalizations?
MALE SPEAKER: Thank
you very much.
If you have a
question, please step
to the stuff to
the microphone so
that you can be heard
on the recording,
and in remote offices.
I do apologize, we won't
have time for many questions,
maybe two or three
just because we had--
you cannot have too
much of a good thing,
I enjoyed it myself, even though
we went overtime a little bit.
So, go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Thanks
for a great talk.
I have a question,
I've always been
interested in how you have
all these curious examples,
not just in this presentation
but also in your books--
and I'm curious
how you index them?
Do you keep them in your
head or you search for them
specifically for
a particular case?
STEVEN PINKER: Both.
So I have-- for many
years, actually--
literally for
decades, literally.
I have-- in the
old days of paper,
I used to read
with the scissors,
and when I'd come across an
interesting example or a joke I
would cut it out, circle it,
put it in a couple of files.
Now I can cut and paste
or save digitally.
For examples of bad prose,
I have the huge advantage
of being an academic.
So I swim in the stuff.
That was the easy part.
And then there are some sites
that I took advantage of.
It turns out there's a Pinterest
site, in which a woman just
collected every cartoon or
sticker or t-shirt she could
find that was about
grammar, and so that
was a rich source of grammatical
humor that I can wander.
And as I was writing
the book, I especially
kept an eye open for examples
that would illuminate a point.
So a bit of everything.
AUDIENCE: Hi there,
thanks for the great talk.
I'm looking forward
to reading the book.
Just a small thing
I would say first,
but you reminded me
that 15 years ago when
I was shopping for a
dictionary in a bookstore,
I actually was digging
through the dictionaries
and rejecting all the ones
that had incentivize in there
as a word, because
it's not a word.
But I guess it is
because people use it.
STEVEN PINKER: Yes
in fact it is a word.
AUDIENCE: Darn it!
And also figuratively
versus literally actually
has been misused for
a really long time,
there's a lot of
history on that.
But I was wondering, you
kept talking about language,
and I kept wondering,
well this is--
you're talking about
language but you're
talking about English.
Have you explored anything with
other linguists about problems
like this that are similar
in other either Latin based
languages, or not
Latin based languages?
STEVEN PINKER: I imagine
that much of the advice
would carry over.
We all comprehend things
using the same brains
and the advantage of
allowing your reader
to visualize something as
opposed to just spooning out
cliches surely holds
in every language.
And indeed, classic style which
is the central image from which
a lot of these bits of advice
are theorems, are implications.
According to Thomas
and Turner, it
was actually invented by
the great French essayists
of the 17th century.
And even though French
style is in many ways
different from English
style, they credit writers
like Descartes, and
[INAUDIBLE] with coming up
with this conceit of pretending
that you're describing
a world all the differences
between the French language
and English language
clearly did not matter.
There are, to be sure, there
must be some differences,
especially when it comes to the
way in which the linearization
of words in syntax conveys
a tangled web of ideas.
Because there there are some
obvious cross linguistic
differences.
In German for example,
the verb comes
at the end of the sentence
instead of the beginning.
And so the tips on how to engage
the reader's mind in real time
would have to be
modified accordingly.
I'll find out when
this book is translated
into other languages
how many questions I get
and how the translator
will deal with them.
As far as the words-- new
words like incentivize go,
incentivize actually turns
out to be a pretty useful word
because there's
no-- remember, one
of the guidelines for writing
is omit needless words.
And if you say something
like layout incentives for,
that's an awful lot
of needless words.
Moreover, when you compress
a phrase into a verb,
it adds a semantic difference.
Namely that it implies
that there's something
that you are directly
and immediately causing.
And as we become more aware
that policy changes that
may have been thought up
and implemented to achieve
some abstract goal may
have perverse results.
Because as soon as they
lay out the incentives,
people will follow
the incentives.
Perhaps doing
something the opposite
of what the writers
of legislation intend,
the verb incentivize reminds
you that in doing something
you are automatically changing
the landscape of options
and so it conveys an
additional meaning
above and beyond
creating incentives for.
AUDIENCE: Right it
makes it active.
STEVEN PINKER: Exactly,
it's active, it's direct,
it's causal.
AUDIENCE: As opposed to
providing incentives.
STEVEN PINKER: Exactly.
AUDIENCE: Which does
sound kind of passive.
I've gotten over it,
it was 15 years ago.
So I'm over it now.
STEVEN PINKER: In fact so
what you are going through,
and probably many
people in this room
have gone through
our own lifetimes
is what E.B. White never went
through in the transition
from to contact as a neologism
to a part of every day English.
And so this happens.
Whether or not you're
convinced by my arguments
that incentivize
is a useful word,
it doesn't matter what we think.
If people use it, it becomes
entrenched in the language.
Yes, the dictionary
writers will include it,
they have no choice.
There are selling a product
that has to be useful.
What does useful mean?
You write according to the
way that your readers will
expect words to be used.
What we do int he American
Heritage Dictionary is
that because it's
not-- generally,
when you look something
up in a dictionary,
you don't care about how
any old person on the street
uses language.
You have in mind a kind of
virtual audience of readers
who care about language, who
expect the writer to take care
in their choice of words.
So we assembled a sample,
called the usage panel
of about 200 journalists,
linguists, sports writers,
poets, novelists, kind
of a sample of people
who just have shown
they care about words.
And we pole them, we ask them,
what do you think incentivize?
And their decisions
will determine
what goes into the dictionary.
And in cases where it's
too close to 50-50,
there will be a usage
note that just explains
the history of the word,
explains the current reaction,
and you-- the writer can then
make an informed decision.
AUDIENCE: I went
through my dictionary
and put post-it notes on all
my favorites usage notes.
STEVEN PINKER: Of
very good, yes.
AUDIENCE: To be
graduated from college,
as opposed to
graduating from college.
STEVEN PINKER: That's
an excellent example,
because there, again,
the language is changing,
there are purists who would
say it has to be graduated
from college, but that's not
the way people talk anymore.
AUDIENCE: Thanks very much.
STEVEN PINKER: Thank
for your question.
MALE SPEAKER: I apologize,
I'm afraid we'll have two more
questions, and then
we'll have to move on.
AUDIENCE: Hi, thanks for coming,
it's so great to have you here.
I studied you a long time ago
in a linguistics course at UCLA.
I-- on the subject of usage
and things becoming popular
convention, and pet peeves,
I don't know how much
you're exposed to what
I call corporate ease ,
but I think this group knows
that people have started using
verbs as nouns, or nouns as
verbs like top asks are top
asks in the meeting,
or are learnings.
STEVEN PINKER: Asks.
AUDIENCE: Asks-- yeah, plural.
It's very, very, irritating.
Or the learnings that
we got from the trip.
Or to architect
something, make it a verb.
I want to know if this bothers
you as much as it does me,
and if you might consider
making a PSA demanding
but this be abolished.
STEVEN PINKER: Well
the uh, I can't do it.
[LAUGHTER]
I'll tell you why.
AUDIENCE: You heard this right?
STEVEN PINKER: Yeah.
Oh yes absolutely.
And I have a Dilbert
cartoon where
the boss with the pointy hair
asks one of his employees,
I would like to task
you with the deliverable
and she and she
completely freaks out.
My world is falling
apart, task is not a verb.
A couple of observations--
one, it's not new.
This has been going on, probably
for many number of centuries,
probably at least since
the Middle English period
or at least early
modern English.
Again the reason that Strunk
and White had a problem
with to contact is that contact
for them was only a noun,
and it was turned into a verb.
Now, do any of you have
a problem with contact?
I don't have a problem
with to contact.
And in fact, if you were to go
through any passage of prose,
you would find
probably about a fifth
of the verbs started
out life as nouns.
We notice the new ones,
but it's a process that's
been going on for
a long, long time.
it's one of the things
that makes English English.
And you often forget how many
verbs from nouns there are.
To chair a meeting, to table
the motion, to pen your memoir,
to hand me the cookies,
to foot the bill.
There are-- it's only the new
ones that get under our skin.
It's not that it's inherent
to the English language
that verbing a noun
leads to a monstrosity.
Then there's a--
but I agree, there's
a lot of corporate
prose that is annoying,
especially when
it's unnecessary.
But there are ones
that will earn
a foothold in the language
because as with incentivize
they not only capture a meaning
while omitting needless words,
but they add the extra
meaning that this is now
a conventional,
direct, causal process.
And that's why task
started to creep in.
Who knows whether it will last,
or be a fad word like some
of the ones for
the "Mad Men" era.
But there's nothing we
can do, some new verbs
will come from nouns
and vice versa.
AUDIENCE: Trying to [INAUDIBLE].
STEVEN PINKER: [LAUGHTER] Yes.
Last question.
Maybe say the serenity
prayer, accept the changes
that you can't do
anything about.
AUDIENCE: So you mentioned
literally a couple times,
and how horrifying it can be.
And there's also
some other words
like that have evolved to use be
used the opposite of what they
mean, like peruse, people use to
mean scan quickly when it means
to pour over in detail.
STEVEN PINKER: Yes, peruse.
AUDIENCE: I'm all for the
evolution of language,
but it seems like
not really productive
to have words evolve to mean
the opposite of what they mean.
And I was wondering what
you think about that.
STEVEN PINKER: Right.
Well there is this
category sometimes called
a contranyms or autoantonyms.
Things like to dust,
which can either
mean to put dust on,
as in crop dusting,
or to take dust
away as in a duster.
To sanction, to table.
Often what happens
is that words will--
a word will start off and then
have varies near synonyms that
have slightly different
meanings and then
one meaning will give rise
to another until they meet
and have sentences that
are the direct opposite.
It doesn't happen all that
often and usually these things
are clear in context.
The vast majority of words
have more than one meaning.
You just flip over
dictionary to any word,
and it's meaning one,
meaning two, meaning three,
and generally they are
distinguished by context.
They can survive side by
side, so the word literate
can mean either actually
capable of reading,
or it could mean sophisticated.
Conservative can
mean on the right
of the American
political spectrum
or resistant to change.
And so you have
conservative liberal,
and it's not an oxymoron.
So word meanings can coexist.
In terms of doing
something about it
I quote the famous exchange
between Margaret Fuller who
once wrote, I
accept the universe.
And Thomas Carlyle who
said, god, you better.
Language change is
going to happen,
and there's almost nothing
that one can do about it.
It doesn't mean that language
degenerates or deteriorates
though because often the
sloppy meanings that we dislike
can survive side by side
with the precise meaning
that we do like.
And it's interesting to go
back in the history of usage
and find the same issues
that annoy people today
were annoying people
a century ago.
So if you're one of the
people-- one of those who likes
the word disinterested to mean
without a vested interest as
opposed to being a
synonym for bored.
And you worry if people use
disinterested to mean cored,
we're going to lose that lovely
word disinterested meaning
unbiased or without
a best interest.
But people have been
using disinterested
to mean bored for
centuries, and we still
have the more precise meaning
without a vested interest in.
So language change does not
imply language degeneration.
Often the more precise
word is available.
And literally is another
example, a lot of people
use it to me as a kind
of an intensifier,
a bit of hyperbole.
But there's still cases
in which you use literally
to mean literally
it's clear in context
that that's the way
you're using it.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you
very much, Professor Pinker,
it's been a joy.
And thank you all for coming.
