Max

“third way to put language in its place is to think about how we use it. Writing and speaking do not consist of transcribing an interior monologue onto paper or playing it into a microphone. Rather, we engage in a constant give-and-take between the thoughts we try to convey and the means our language offers to convey them. We often grope for words, are dissatisfied with what we write because it does not express what we wanted to say, or discover when every combination of words seems wrong that we do not really know what we want to say. And when we get frustrated by a mismatch between our language and our thoughts, we don’t give up, defeated and mum, but change the language.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“We concoct neologisms (quark, meme, clone, deep structure), invent slang (to spam, to diss, to flame, to surf the web, a spin doctor), borrow useful words from other languages (joie de vivre, schlemiel, angst, machismo), or coin new metaphors (waste time, vote with your feet, push the outside of the envelope).”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“No learning rule can be entirely devoid of theoretical content nor can the tabula ever be completely rasa.” 13”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

“Children acquire spoken language instinctively but written language only by the sweat of their brow, because spoken language has been a feature of human life for tens or hundreds of millennia whereas written language is a recent and slow-spreading invention.”
― Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature