Words and Rules Quotes

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.”
― Steven Pinker, Words and Rules

“As an experimental psychologist I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores. To”
― Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

“I also get a perverse pleasure from correcting students who refer to an important piece of data or write that this data is important. (Data is the plural of datum, I tell them, so one ought to say, The datum is important; The data are important.) Yet”
― Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

“And every word has at most one inflectional suffix. We never get opensed or opensing, nor do the plural -s and possessive s stack up when several owners own something: the dogs’ blanket, not the dogs’s (dogzez) blanket. Finally,”
― Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

“Most disputes about “correct” usage are questions of custom and authority rather than grammatical logic (see “The Language Mavens” in my book The Language Instinct), and in these disputes in particular, both parties have grammatical logic on their side. Their”
― Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language