Cool Book

The Stuff of Thought

Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought, published in 2007, looks like a good resources to writers. I was drawn to its subtitle: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Since writers rely on language to open (sometimes close) this window, I think most writers would find this book interesting.

Pinker looks at words and how they convey whole worlds, shows how we conceptualize ideas and lock them in language, or how we capture language and lock it into our thought processes. Language expresses what goes on in our minds and the words we choose communicate much more than we realize. I wouuld add that as writers, the words we find ourselves using, the words we choose to keep in the final drafts of our writing, are key to an understanding of of what we write and read.

Pinker also takes the Lakoff route and examines metaphor, calling it "metaphor of metaphor", because, I suspect, if language is already metaphorical, what we often call metaphors are metaphors of metaphors.

Chapter 6 promises to be my favorite. Entitled "What's in a Name?", the chapter is about "naming--naming babies, and naming things in general." Pinker shows how names are part of the ways in which we decipher meaning since names are words or signs that either refer to something in the material world, or that summarize conceptual matter in our thought process (so we may talk of meaning by experience). Meanings of names, Pinker states, may be determined either in terms of sense (the basis of which is usually in our heads)or as reference (the basis of which is in things in the world). Names are not as randomly-conceived as we might suspect, but sometimes we "stipulate their meanings" (which can be liberating to a writer) in a "system of rules" (which every writer should undertand--in other words, do what you want with words, but know what rules you are working with or without).

Coming from cultures (Shona and Ndebele of Zimbabwe), that use names with meanings, names like Doubt, Nkululeko, Desire, Ever-ever), I can see how this chapter is a winner for me. I want something that reminds me that as a writer, I can't just give characters random names; I have to remember that those names may come with many burdens or blessings, that, as the previous paragraph show, follow (or are informed by) certain rules.

Pinker also looks at profanity in "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" and shows why it would make sense to discourage people from being profane in certain situations--he takes this topic to the primal conceptualization of language in our congnitve process--don't ask me what this means, but it sounds interesting and important.

As I read the first chapter, which deals with words, I liked how Pinker dismissed some post-structuralists' arguments on language, especially those that say language is indeterminate and cannot fully be trusted to convey concrete meaning because by nature the signifying process is too arbitrary and playful, and in this mode of thinking, "play" is a big word. Well, Pinker argues that there is stability in the way we assign meanings to words, and that, once conceptualized, once glued to the thought process, those words are quite capable of carrying certain stable chunks of meaning. Of course, after he says it, you realize that, duh, why would anyone think otherwise...arbitray or not, meaning in our language, in the words we use, has to be understood as the meaning it is, the meaning we have made it become, the meaning it means. There is thus meaning stored in the brain, and meaning in the referent, in the thing itself.

Here is a taste of Pinker in The Stuff of Thought:
"So what does William Shakespeare mean...? A name really has no definition in terms of other words, concepts, or pictures. Instead, it points to an entity in the world, because at some in time the entity was dubbed with the name and the name stuck".

"The connectedness of words to real people and things, and not just to information about people and things, has a practical application..."

"Naming a baby if the only opportunity most people get to choose what something will be called. But every one of the half a million words in the Oxford English Dictionary had to have been thought up up by a person at some point in history, accepted by a community, and perpetuated down through the eons."

I plan to read and enjoy the rest of this book.