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As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was p...more

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When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

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Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train travel? You suffer f...more

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What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so c...more

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Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so...more

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Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly,...more

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Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instin...more

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And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fiddle-faddle and not faddle- fiddle? Why is it ping-...more

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The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and h...more

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The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Langua...more

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I think about how language works so I can best explain how language works.

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Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically liter...more