22 reviewed Language A to Z by John McWhorter
Review of 'Language A to Z' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
So unadulterated awesome! I died in the “like” lecture when he imitated a German speaker (in accented English) quoting someone who didn’t like pears.
When I find someone stiffnecked with a lack of imagination, I casually get them a copy of these lectures. The richness of this thing we call humanity! An awareness of which will bring us closer, I hope.
Ahmed’s rant time. Small ones this time!
At one point McWhorter concisely presents his pet theory about why water bottles have become popular in the last twenty years: like cigarettes, they give us something to hold, let us interrupt our conversations, and satisfy our oral fixation—he notes how people twenty years ago didn’t carry around water and weren’t getting dehydrated. Well, twenty years ago there was a lot less salt and preservatives in our food—which becomes immediately obvious when you home-cook for a few days and then visit a …
So unadulterated awesome! I died in the “like” lecture when he imitated a German speaker (in accented English) quoting someone who didn’t like pears.
When I find someone stiffnecked with a lack of imagination, I casually get them a copy of these lectures. The richness of this thing we call humanity! An awareness of which will bring us closer, I hope.
Ahmed’s rant time. Small ones this time!
At one point McWhorter concisely presents his pet theory about why water bottles have become popular in the last twenty years: like cigarettes, they give us something to hold, let us interrupt our conversations, and satisfy our oral fixation—he notes how people twenty years ago didn’t carry around water and weren’t getting dehydrated. Well, twenty years ago there was a lot less salt and preservatives in our food—which becomes immediately obvious when you home-cook for a few days and then visit a restaurant (not to mention try processed food). So it’s possible people are indeed more likely to get dehydrated these days compared to twenty years ago, since it takes a lot of water to digest salt. That’s just one thing that’s changed in the last twenty years that could explain the rise of the water bottle.
In the lecture on T for tones, he summarized research showing first language tonality correlates with perfect pitch. He repeats the notion, popular since Mozart’s day, that perfect pitch is mainly genetic, but very recent research, which capstones thirty years of other research on perfect pitch, shows that it is readily learned by nearly all young children with a simple training program. Asian families tend to also be more likely to give their kids such training early in life (four, where an American family might not think about music lessons until eight). Anders Ericsson tidily summarizes this research, with citations, in his book Peak, which I will dig out if anyone asks.
Neither of these subvert any of McWhorter’s arguments! But these lectures drill home the point, over and over again, that what we think we know is so often not the whole story, and that it pays to keep asking questions, keep looking for falsifying evidence, keep looking through the microscope. Science marches on!
