In her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood describes a future after humanity had been almost entirely wiped out by a plague. Jimmy, aka Snowman, lives...
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Once you read this book, you will never again (I hope!) dismiss an opponent's argument as "mere semantics." Not only does Pinker prove that shades of meaning among words are important (hardly a revolutionary insight), but he also shows how the meanings attached to certain words reveal structures in the brain that have nothing to do with language or the words we use--and this IS revolutionary! If you've ever wondered how human beings managed to think for nearly 3 million years before language was invented, this book will make that clear.
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The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker
patswee2006, November 15, 2007
Once you read this book, you will never again (I hope!) dismiss an opponent's argument as "mere semantics." Not only does Pinker prove that shades of meaning among words are important (hardly a revolutionary insight), but he also shows how the meanings attached to certain words reveal structures in the brain that have nothing to do with language or the words we use--and this IS revolutionary! If you've ever wondered how human beings managed to think for nearly 3 million years before language was invented, this book will make that clear.(25 of 42 readers found this comment helpful)