Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

Ironically, our ability to moderate temptation increases with age, even as our life expectancy goes down. Children, who are the most likely to live into the future, are the least likely to be patient enough to wait for it.

26

Fans of the history of neuroscience will recognize this as the brain region that was skewered in the brain of one Phineas Gage, injured on September 13, 1848.

27

If to err is human, to write it down is divine. This chapter is written in memory of the late Vicki Fromkin, an early pioneer in linguistics who was the first to systematically collect and study human speech errors. You can read more about her at http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/from kin/fromkin.htm.

28

Forgive me if I leave poetry out of this. Miscommunication can be a source of mirth, and ambiguity may enrich mysticism and literature. But in both cases, it’s likely that we’re making the best of an imperfection, not exploiting traits specifically shaped by their adaptive value.

29

Perhaps even more galling to Franco-purists is that their own fabrique de Nimes became known in English as “denim” — only to return to France as simply les blue jeans in the mother tongue. There are barbarians at the gate, and those barbarians are us.

30

According to a recent article in The New Yorker, were it not for the Heimlich maneuver, all of the following people might have choked: Cher (vitamin pill), Carrie Fisher (Brussels sprout), Dick Vitale (melon), Ellen Barkin (shrimp), and Homer Simpson (doughnut). The article continued with a list of “heroes,” celebrities who saved others from certain death: “Tom Brokaw (John Chancellor, Gouda cheese), Verne Lundquist (Pat Haden, broccoli), Pierce Brosnan (Halle Berry, fruit), Justin Timberlake (a friend, nuts), Billy Bob Thornton (his potbellied pig Albert, chicken Marsala).” Especially eerie was the tale of actor Mandy Patinkin, saved from a caesar salad just three weeks after wrapping a film called — I kid you not — The Choking Man.

31

Co-articulation did not evolve exclusively for use in speech; we see the same principle at work in skilled pianists (who prepare for thumb-played notes about two notes before they play them), skilled typists, and major league baseball pitchers (who prepare the release of the ball well before it occurs).

Or Jimi Hendrix’s “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” for “Excuse me while I kiss this guy.” If you, like me, get a kick out of these examples, Google for the term Mondegreen and find oodles more.

32

Is that good or bad? That depends on your point of view. The logic of partial matches is what makes languages sloppy, and, for better or worse, keeps poets, stand-up comedians, and linguistic curmudgeons gainfully employed. (“Didja ever notice that a near-miss isn’t a miss at all?”)

33

Although I have long been a huge fan of Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics, I have serious reservations about this particular line of work. I’m not sure that elegance really works in physics (see Lee Smolin’s recent book The Trouble with Physics), and in any case, what works for physics may well not work for linguistics. Linguistics, after all, is a property of biology — the biology of the human brain — and as the late Francis Crick once put it, “In physics, they have laws; in biology, we have gadgets.” So far as we know, the laws of physics have never changed, from the moment of the big bang onward, whereas the details of biology are constantly in flux, evolving as climates, predators, and resources, change. As we have seen so many times, evolution is often more about alighting on something that happens to work than what might in principle work best or most elegantly; it would be surprising if language, among evolution’s most recent innovations, was any different.

34

In a hypothetical recursion-free language, you might, for example, be able to say “Give me the fruit” and “The fruit is on the tree,” but not the more complex expression “Give me the fruit that is hanging on the tree that is missing a branch.” The words “that is hanging on the tree that is missing a branch” represent an embedded clause itself containing an embedded clause.

35

Recursion can actually be divided into two forms, one that requires a stack and one that doesn’t. The one that doesn’t is easy. For example, we have no trouble with sentences like This is the cat that bit the rat that chased the mouse, which are complex but (for technical reasons) can be parsed without a