Louder than words
Whether it's brusque, convincing, fraught with emotion, or dripping with innuendo, language is fundamentally a tool for conveying meaning - a uniquely human magic trick in which you vibrate your vocal cords to make your innermost thoughts pop up in someone else's mind. You can use it to talk about all sorts of things - from your new labradoodle puppy to the expansive gardens at Versailles, from Roger Federer's backhand to things that don't exist at all, like flying pigs. And when you talk, your listener fills in lots of details you didn't mention - the curliness of the dog's fur or the vast statuary on the grounds of the French palace. What's the trick behind this magic? How does meaning work? In Louder than Words, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen draws together a decade's worth of research in psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to offer a new theory of how our minds make meaning. When we hear words and sentences, Bergen contends, we engage the parts of our brain that we use for perception and action, repurposing these evolutionarily older networks to create simulations in our minds. These embodied simulations, as they're called, are what makes it possible for us to become better baseball players by merely visualizing a well-executed swing; what allows us to remember which cupboard the diapers are in without looking, and what makes it so hard to talk on a cell phone while we're driving on the highway.
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What Hacker News says
- This cognitive science/cognitive linguistics books were a hinge point for me:
George Lakoff:
- Philosophy In The Flesh http://amzn.to/2xFTKU7
- The Political Mind http://amzn.to/2vU9rF1
Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner:
- The Way We Think http://amzn.to/2xFv4ep
Benjamin K. Bergen:
- Louder Than Words http://amzn.to/2wwsMhv
- If you haven't read it, it sounds like you would also enjoy 'Louder than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning' (http://www.amazon.com/Louder-Than-Words-Science-Meaning/dp/0...)
I haven't ready Metaphors we live by, I'll pick it up!
- I detest this essay. I won't go too far into the reasons why, because David Beaver has already done an excellent job of that: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992
I'd also agree with Geoff Pullum's characterization of it as "a smug, arrogant, dishonest tract full of posturing and pothering, and writing advice that ranges from idiosyncratic to irrational" (http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/04/04/eliminati...)
But apart from it being a very poor source of writing advice, I don't believe it's accurate in its diagnosis of how language is deployed for political ends—the question is a much more complicated one than he claims here.
There exist actual good books that can teach you how to write better, instead of patting you on the back and allowing you to tut-tut at those plebians who write things that are "outright barbarous". Pinker's The Sense of Style is one of those; Ann Lamott's Bird by Bird is another. There also exist much better (and more accurate and scientific) resources about how language actually affects the way we think about things. Benjamin Bergen's Louder than Words is an excellent start, and virtually anything from Lakoff's long list of publications is worth reading—Metaphors We Live By is the classic, but Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things in particular is excellent from his more recent work.
