the sense of style steven pinker summary

We are warned against the righteous authoritarianism of those who turn conventions into commandments. Pinker enjoys assembling the sottisier, but he knows that our judgments about usage are mostly provoked by snobbery, as when Brian Jones’s father, a church organist in Cheltenham, chastised the Rolling Stones for their improper lyrics and said they should have been singing “I can’t get any satisfaction”. Luckily, it’s also full of Jewish jokes, Doonesbury cartoons, and innumerable bathetic specimens of bad writing: my favourite – a sentence sabotaged by the lack of a comma – is the summary of a world tour by Peter Ustinov, which allegedly included “encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector”.Īt its best, The Sense of Style is a comedy of linguistic bad manners, a compendium of hilarious gaffes. What interests Pinker is cognition, the impromptu mental adjustments we perform when trying to organise and articulate complex thoughts, and his book is a little too well furnished with analytical diagrams about sentence structure, with arrows looping round in circles and phrases splayed along diagonal axes. But we should be grateful for such verbosity, which suggests the indecisive convolutions of the later Henry James: in the previous administration, President Bush sonorously asked: “Is our children learning?” while Dan Quayle, his goofy vice president, bossily erased “potato” on a school blackboard and corrected it to “potatoe”.

Politicians meanwhile torment language to prevent it from saying anything at all, as when John Kerry recently announced that Obama was “desirous of trying to see how we can make our efforts in order to find a way to facilitate”, which merely meant, Pinker guesses, that “the president wanted to help”. The theorists he mocks rely on abstraction to conceal the vacuity of what they’re purporting to say, and to make those who can’t talk the requisite talk feel stupid.

Pinker, a psycholinguist who teaches at Harvard, is nest-foulingly vitriolic about the obfuscations of academic prose, and classifies passages by critics such as Judith Butler and Fredric Jameson as verbal “sludge”. Did the mistake reveal a certain unease – a suspicion that Churchill’s personal determination wouldn’t be shared by all his countrymen? It hardly matters, because Britain won the war. Since he was speaking in the second person on the nation’s behalf, he should have said “We will never surrender”. Pinker also forgives Churchill, who in his most rousingly prophetic speech vowed that “ We shall never surrender”. Captain Kirk is within his rights “to boldly go” wherever in the universe he pleases, which anyway sounds more enterprising than “to go boldly”. That, Pinker points out, is where it belongs, despite the pedants: the ban is a fussy genuflection to Latin, where infinitives can’t be split because they are single, indivisible words – “amare”, not “to love”.

The sense of style steven pinker summary