Word: pinkering
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...After a tough week of school, why don't we say 'This week really bit? Or bited? Or bitted?'" quipped author Steven Pinker during his talk last night at the Graduate School of Education...
...Pinker, who is also the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, used examples like this to illustrate his beliefs about language acquisition and to promote his new book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. The event was sponsored by the Askwith Education Forum and Wordsworth Books...
Addressing a standing-room only crowd, Pinker explained the origins of children's grammatical mistakes, the etymology of irregular verbs and why, for example, people say "slept" instead of "sleeped." His sprinkling of uncommon and incorrect forms of words throughout the talk, such as "smote," "clove" and "cleaved," elicited bursts of laughter from his audience...
Students in Science B-29: Human Behavioral Biology read about Pinker's research in the course sourcebook. His findings about the development of language and behavior are seen as revolutionary advances in the fields...
...there is dissent even within the "ultra-Darwinist" ranks. M.I.T. linguist Steven Pinker finds the ideas of memetics intriguing and occasionally even useful but doesn't quite believe it's a science. Nor does he accept the nest-of-memes view of consciousness. "To be honest, I don't even know what that means," admits Pinker. The problem, he says, is that memetics assumes the brain is essentially passive, like a Petri dish awaiting infection. It doesn't account for the self that responds subjectively, that feels sensations such as love, envy and pain. "Babies are conscious," he points...