679) In contemporary middle-class American culture, parenting is seen as an awesome responsibility, an unforgiving vigil to keep the helpless infant from falling behind in the great race of life. The belief that Motherese is essential to language development is part of the same mentality that send yuppies to "learning centers" to buy little mittens will bull's-eyes to help their babies find their hands sooner.

One gets some perspective from examining the folk theories about parenting in other cultures. The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa believe that children must be drilled to sit, stand, and walk. They carefully pile sand around their infants to prop them upright, and sure enough, every one of these infants soon sits up on its own. We find this amusing because we have observed the results of the experiment that the San are unwilling to chance: we don't teach our children to sit, stand, and walk, and they did it anyway, on their own schedule. But other groups enjoy the same condescension toward us. In many communities of the world, parents do not indulge their children in Motherese. In fact, they do not speak to their prelinguistic children at all, except for occasional demands and rebukes. This is not unreasonable. After all, young children plainly can't understand a word you say. So why waste your breath in soliloquies? Any sensible person would surely wait until a child has developed speech and more gratyifying two-way conversations become possible.

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct (1994)

680) Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Oscar Wilde
"The Critic as Artist" (1891) [CQ]
quoted by Stephen Pinker in
The Language Instinct (1994)

681) When I questioned our local computer wizard about what she meant when she said she was going to frob my workstation, she gave me this tutorial on hackerese. When you get a brand-new equalizer for your stereo and aimlessly slide the knobs up and down to hear the effects, that is frobbing. When you move the knobs by medium-sized amounts to get the sound to your general liking. that is twiddling. When you make the final small adjustments to get it perfect, that is tweaking.

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct (1994)

682) Computer parsers are too meticulous for their own good. They find ambiguities [...] that would never occur to a sane person. [...] The sentence Time flies like an arrow is surely unambiguous is there ever was an unambiguous sentence (ignoring the difference between literal and metaphorical meanings, which have nothing to do with syntax). But to the surprise of the programmers, the sharp-eyed computer [at Harvard in the 60s] found it to have five different trees!

• Time proceeds as quickly as an arrow proceeds. (the intended reading)


• Measure the speed of flies in the same way that you measure the speed of an arrow.


• Measure the speed of flies in the same way that an arrow measures the speed of flies.


• Measure the speed of flies that resemble an arrow.


• Flies of a particular kind, time-flies, are fond of an arrow.

Among computer scientists the discovery has been summed up in the aphorism "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct (1994)

683) [T]ry to think of the life cycle in a different way. Imagine that what the genes control is not a factory sending appliances into the world, but a machine shop in a thrifty theatre company to which props and sets and materials periodically return to be dismantled and reassembled for the next production. At any point, different contraptions can come out of the shop, depending on current needs. The most obvious biological illustration is metamorphosis. In insects, the genes build an eating machine, let it grow, build a container around it, dissolve it into a puddle of nutrients, and recycle them into a breeding machine. Even in humans, the sucking reflex disappears, teeth erupt twice, and a suite of secondary sexual characteristics emerge in a maturational schedule. Now complete the mental backflip. Think of metamorphosis and maturational emergence not as the exception but as the rule. The genes, shaped by natural selection, control bodies during the life span; designs hang around during times of life that they are useful, not before or after.

Stephen Pinker
The Language Instinct (1994)

684) If my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandfather.

Yiddish folk saying
quoted by Stephen Pinker in
The Language Instinct (1994)

Sources

[CQ] - The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 689 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.