Pinker's Essay 'Could You Pass The Salt'

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4. Pinker’s essay appeared in Time magazine which has several different types of people reading it. Pinker managed to make the linguistic concepts known to everyone who read it through his examples he used. In his explanations on each linguistic concept he showed how one uses one of them in everyday life. By doing this he made it extremely easy for readers to understand exactly what each strategy was and how it worked without confusing anyone in the process. An example of this is the “whimperative” linguistic concept. He could have described it in a definition that few would understand, but instead he chose to explain by the simple question of, “Could you pass the salt?” He finds relatable situations for each concept in order to break it down…show more content…
Pinker ends his essays with a quote that compares language to a window of human nature, but is also a way that human’s are exposed to the infectious world. When Pinker says this he means that language is a part of every human being and there is no stopping it, but when someone chooses to use language they are also choosing to be a part of all the different things that make language a bad thing in the world, too. Language is the reason for many people’s anger, sadness, and even happiness, and not everyone uses it the same as what we would like. It is a powerful tool that can make or break someone’s day. What Pinker means is that language is infectious because of all the bad things it can do to someone just by a few simple words. Language is very indirect at times because of the way people choose to use it, and it causes many issues amongst people due to their side-stepping around others. The quote shows that indirect speech is like an infectious disease that cannot be stopped once it has spread. Everyone around the world uses it whether they choose to admit to it or not. If Pinker had put this quote in earlier in the essay, I believe it would not have been as effective because he did not have all the support to make us truly understand what he meant by the end of the essay. The quote being at the end summarizes everything he supported and claimed into one

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