This is the latest in the long-
running series of popular books that Steven Pinker, a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard, has written about the human mind, particularly about the nature of thought and its relationship to language. Pinker is extremely interested not only in the nature of language, and the way in which languages work, but also in lots of odd or striking things about languages. As part of his attempt to make some highly complex and abstract ideas comprehensible and even attractive, he uses a huge number of examples. Sometimes you feel that his hope is that even if you don’t quite cotton on to his theoretical positions, at least you will enjoy the quotations, jokes, even illustrations, that he bombards you with. He has a chapter, for instance, called ‘The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television,’ in which he discusses the nature of taboo words, which subjects they are likely to occur in, why it is that the same thing can be called by one word that is decent and another is obscene, how some areas that used to be considered out of bounds no longer are, and many other topics.
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