The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
People tend to judge who you are according to how you speak and write as an effortlessly conspicuous touchstone of your intelligence. The pesky lexical solecism in writing, funny way of talking with accents, and fumbling manner of delivering thoughts are the Three Capital Sins decreed by English Language Purists regarding English Undefiled. Since English is not my mother tongue, such derisive experience often forced me to conform to the notion that the language ability determines general cognitive ability, until I read Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct.
Pinker, who himself came from a French/English/Yiddish linguistic family background, asserts that the salient features of language should not be synonymous with the performer’s general reasoning ability. He expounds that the language is the instinct, a survival mechanism resulting from human evolution, universal in humankind, whether technologically primitive or advanced. It is a highly specialized mental module established through the passing of times by wonderfully flexible human faculty of learning by mutation, heritability, and isolation. The aptly fitting allusion to the biblical Tower of Babel illustrates the universality of language due to the innate universal human consciousness. Hence, different languages are the descendants of the proto-type language with its changeable nature according to the passing of times, calling for changes in social and cultural modes of life.
In this sense, idioms and other forms of English-based pidgins demonstrate divergent evolutionary traits of English, not the illiteracy of the speakers of such languages. Pinker remonstrates with famous critics, editors, and writers, who are bulwarks of the Pure English since language is the instinct, not the mind itself. Their judging people based on how they speak and write shows the ignorance of the truth, seeing what they want from their designated vantage point of arrogant grammarians. Come to think of it, didn’t William Shakespeare, a former maker of leather gloves with a limited education of grammar school, ruffle the feathers of his university-educated colleagues in his time? Leo Tolstoy, Emily Bronte, and Jane Austen were not perfect spellers, nor was Jack Kerouac, who often stumbled into existential lingual vertigo because English was not his mother tongue.
The book covers everything you want to know about language: how and when people started to speak the way they do now, where the origin of proto-type language took place, and why language is not a barometer of intelligence. There is no such thing as linguistic relativity, a principle claiming that how you speak affects how you think, which alternately means that you are not as intelligent as you like to believe because your English is imperfect. I could not believe why many people disagree with Pinker’s view of the language instinct. They pillory him for being something of a language eugenist when he is against those language mavens, one of whom publicly derided Pinker for defending his parents’ less than perfect English language ability. The depth and breadth of knowledge that Pinker shares with his reader become scintillating with his trenchant wit and feisty honesty, comparable to Samuel Johnson, author of A Dictionary of the English Language. This book addressed my soul-searching question of language and its relation to intelligence, and it prescribed to my wounded soul with a new perspective of language as the instinct. Whether or not you subscribe to Pinker’s theory of the language instinct is voluntary, but don’t forget that prejudice darkens the knowledge.
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Tag: literature
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‘The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language’, by Steven Pinker – review
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Theodore Tom’s Virgin Maid – ‘How To Be Owned By A Cat’, by Kate C. – review
How To Be Owned By A Cat: Simple Action Plan For First Time Cat Owners Who Have NO Idea What They Are Getting Into by Kate C.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Cats remind me of whimsical and capricious Greek gods and goddesses. Sometimes, cats are like Baroque European aristocrats with sophisticated finickiness. They are like spoiled children with no regard to manners in the sudden pulsing of stalking and jumping, rigidly dominated by their blindly unchecked ego. Whatever of the feline nature it may be, there is undoubtedly more than one of it; cats are convincingly intelligent, bracingly artless, and surprisingly affectionate with a display of individualities particular to each cat. No wonder there are celebrity cats as follows: A Cat in the Puss walking around as if he were man, Tom outwitted by Jerry, Garfield as laid back as his lookalike master, Felix the Car becoming a timeless icon of the style, and Theodore the Cat, who likes to challenge, “Who’s the Boss?” in this amusing read.
With an imposing name associated with a man of outstanding achievement, Theodore likes to think himself as a lifetime resident of a presidential suite attended by his matron-in-waiting Kate, a virgin cat owner without prior experience of raising a cat. Her meeting with Theodore, whom she happened to adopt from a pet shop, is a match made on earth, orchestrated by time and chance, aka Fortune. Or it may be the stars that shine brightly above their heads. The journey both Kate and Theodore has thus far embarked is akin to a real one of a road trip by a small caravan, consisting of bumpy drives, drive-ins, park-ins, give-ins, give-outs, etc. Kate’s relationship with Theodore parallels that of the Chef and his stray gourmet cat named Apollo in John Steinbeck’s “The Amiable Fleas” regarding the narrative’s realistic atmospheres illustrating the significance of ordinariness in daily life. Both works celebrate the values of simple pleasures that give a fresh hold upon our problems and different perspectives on life.
This charming little book also attests to Emerson’s tenet that thinking is the function, and action the functionary. In other words, the understanding of truth results from the successful union of knowledge and practicality on reality. Kate comes to the A-HA moment by realizing that her knowledge about cats from books and the media is not complementary to its applicability to tending her cat, Theodore.
I picked up this read because in reading its summary, I felt related to the author’s case for being a first-time cat owner without initial interest in cats. Her daily interactions with Theodore has taught her that there are no bad cats but only misunderstood cats due to a lack of patience or a deficiency in compassion on human parts. What will happen when what you read from books and watch from Youtube about cats contradict the realities of your Toms and Mollys at home? Just as lawyers do not learn their trade at law schools till they practice, pet owners will not know about their flurry fireballs till they clean their poops. In light of the above, this book is a lightheartedly vivacious and entertainingly down-to-earth read that makes you emphasize with her experience as a first-time cat owner.
Furthermore, for those who criticize the author’s poor writing style as posted on Amazon reviews, I want to tell each of them that being a purist regarding English Underfiled does not guarantee that you are not an ignoramus. Good writing means not in immaculate grammar but in the richness of sentiments and of thoughts. Therefore, I regard this book as an excellent read to read; especially, if you are a virgin cat owner like we are.
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Tiger and Fish
Hope comes in blue wonder
Flapping its tails of vigor,
Little Tiger wonders in silence
If he can touch the brilliance. -
Wounded Wings
I often feel excluded from circles of literary people who seem to think less of what I have written. Be it self-conscious or counterintuitive perception, but my senses feel acutely from the stolid reaction or derisive comments on writing platforms. When my writing is derided or ignored, I take arms against the invisible keyboard scoundrels to guard the bastion of my creative world. Otherwise, I will remain a victim of ruthless bullying combined with barbarous ridicule, which I do not deserve, ever. I am only a human, so there’s no magnanimous pretext of “constructive criticism” because there’s no such.
There are new comments for my review of a particular book posted on Amazon. The acrid and derisive comments that my writing was incomprehensible pierced my heart with a great spear and put my entire body fixed to the wall. While I have been trying to write better, the comments only affirm a doubt about the purpose of writing. The common denominators of the words were as follows:
- They were both men.
- They seemed to form an appreciation of English Undefiled.
- They were British and American.
Though I always try not to associate people with their national characteristics, men who speak English as their mother tongue have a certain air of arrogance, young or old, and seem to delight in schadenfreude. What makes these men put their hands on keyboards to pillory my writing skills in public is astonishingly callous and vile. I am with the disappointment dipped in the anger of Timon of Athens uttering, “The unkindest beast is kinder than a man.” How rightly so.
People associate a fluency of language with a level of intellect, believing that thinking shapes language. Therefore, solecism in writing equals a lack of education, learning disability, or low intelligence. It is their ignorance of such a mode of thought because language is instinct, not a thinking product. It is said that the windows of learning other languages are typically closed at the age of 13. Given that fact, shall we regard someone who tries to exercise an adopted language by writing, however poorly, as a buffoonish dilettant pitifully trying to simulate the impossible?
I am more in sorrow than in anger as I am trying to compose my emotions’ agitated waves. That does not mean I beg for customary sympathy, empty consolation, or instant charity. I want to defy being put in a public pillory to endure underserving mockery, harassment, and ridicule like a poor maid masquerading as a refined lady of high society. Truth is truth to the end of reckoning, and it will reveal itself someday. You may not like my writing, but that doesn’t give you an ipso facto reason to belittle it.
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‘Moonlighting’, (1982) – directed by Jersy Skolimowski – film review
The history of immigrants equals to the history of humankind. It has always been and will be part of the civilization of the world: Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the Trojans’ migration into modern-day Italy, the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, the Norman conquest of England, peoples of all continents landing on America, and many others still counting to this date. It is innately natural for man to move to a place for different reasons, whether they result from cohesion, or volition, or a little bit of both. Jersy Skolimowski’s “Moonlighting” (1982), a British film about a polish electrician named Nowak leading a team working illegally in Lonon, focuses on his daily moments of existential vertigo between the winds of the world and provisional needs of livelihood.
Nowak is an intelligent laborer who accepts the offer from a Polish government official to renovate his house in London with lucrative promise, plus a taste of glamourous capitalism. Yet at the first taste of cold London and cold Londoner that makes his presence miserably pathetic and casually ignorable, Nowak decides to survive in a game of hide-and-seek as best as he can. The work is his only painkiller that rids anxiety and worries off his chest, but the effect is only temporary and minimal. As Rome is a great city when you have money, so is London, and Nowak and his team live their provisional days in hiding and stalking under the suspicion of their not-so-gentlemanly and kindly English neighbors. They regard the Polish workers as no more different than poor foreigners unsuitable for their daily English landscapes. Nowak chooses to be a Hector of his own with his crew of non-speaking polish in a vertigo of existential quandy.
Setting in the early 1980s when Poland was going through her first labor pain of democracy with Lech Wałęsa leading Solidarity Movement, the film’s realistic portrayal of illegal workers’ dailiness is visually palatable. The narrative of Nowak transcends to a ballad of Man anxiously adhering to a sense of purpose that gives him a reason to live in a harsh land surrounded by strangers who don’t like them. It’s a film about how changes in the world affect an individual’s daily life based on a symbolic interactionist theory. The present and future of Nowak and his team cannot escape from the winds of changes crossing their faces, which change the compass of the wheel of fortune.
The film is a hidden gem, starring the veteran English actor Jeremy Irons, whose excellent performance of Nowak deserves special recognition from the Polish audience. Irons is so convincingly Polish in appearance, manners, and speech that the non-speaking performance of the other Polish actors as his team of laborers serves to make his presence more outstandingly Polish. Also, the director being Polish himself contributes to the genuineness of the story’s narrative, which guards against patronizingly officious outsider’s perspectives of the people he wants to tell about because it is also his story. For these reasons, Moonlighting is a bracing film that makes you think whether existentialism in which experience proceeds essence is right. -
‘The Amiable Fleas’, by John Steinbeck – review
John Steinbeck was all man. He was a writer of muscles. I meant the powers of strong individuality that disagreed with grandstanding with the political in-vogue trends of his time with his writing as literature for an ideology of grand cultural context, not for the mind’s pleasurable satisfaction. In a word, Steinbeck appears to be in touch with the real world, with the characters realistic and stories palatable, not confined in the seclusion of a leisurely abstract world of the elite. The Amiable Fleas conveys all of the charms described above of Steinbeck as an attractive raconteur at his best: humorous, heartfelt, and honest in his tough cowboy appearance in a strange city filled with quaint aromas of the old civilization.The Amiable Fleas is Steinbeck’s testimonial narrative of the truth found in life’s ordinariness; the meaning of life realized in the joy of small pleasure against provisional needs of instant fame and worldly prestige. It’s an innate folly of human nature trying to reason against the significance of Serenity, Courage, and Wisdom as if they are remotely associated with Intellect. As Steinbeck held against criticism about avoiding the political and social issues of his time, he tried to reason his own reason for writing about such simple truth of life.
The Amiable Fleas is the res ipsa loquiter of the value of small things that Steinbeck treasures, for it is what keeps the troublesome, pugnacious, bickering human tribe tamable and bearable with humor, which is a handmaid to hope and resilience. The amiable fleas represent the idyllic but oddly likable bunch of professionally intellectual people whose existence is a canvas of abstract painting that lacks a touch of realism. The poet, the architect, and the painter occupy their self-designated seats in the eponymous restaurants in Paris, doing nothing but contemplating about their artistic works in the selfishness of intellectual stasis. The excellent chef of the restaurant M. Amite embodies an artist whose ambition is the stir that his honest mind raises. The desire for fame is the infirmity of his admirably good, hearty nature. The star of the Michelin Guide is the apple of the discord, a symbol of outside influence that incites M. Amite’s ambition, not from his love of cooking to please his feline friend named Apollo. M. Amite is the image of an artist swayed by the great things of the world, even if it would cause him a loss of joyful dailiness.
Originally published in the historically renowned French newspaper Le Figaro on July 31, 1954, as the tenth weekly installment of “One American in Paris,” The Amiable Fleas was published in English for the first time July-November 2019 issue of Strand Magazine. The background of this charming and heartwarming short story was that Steinbeck wanted to be himself, not how the French media imagined him to be or wanted to create their version of him from the counterproductive interviews with the American writer. And so he wrote a series of short stories that only he could tell with his quintessentially American way of storytelling. Yet the result is beyond the territorial boundaries and cultural enclaves, for the narrative reaches the hearts of not only the hard-to-please sophisticated Parisian readers but also the universal readers of all ages. Steinbeck is undeniably American to the core. Yet his love of realism that gives a new viewpoint upon dailiness of life enables readers of the world to get a fresh, bright hold upon our problems. Given that perspective, everything is something, and everyone is someone.
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