The Language Instinct Review: Stephen Fry inspired my read of Steven Pinker’s classic, which has brilliant chapters but is dense

Stephen Fry led me to Steven Pinker’s classic, a fascinating book about language with great chapters but skippable bits.

I discovered this book from Stephen Fry, who has a blog post titled “Don’t Mind Your Language…”. If you haven’t read his blog, then I highly recommend this post on language. It is wonderfully written, fun, and extremely insightful. If you’re at all interested in language, that blog and the accompanying audio version, easily searchable on YouTube, are wonderful. Fry, as I said, referenced this book, and so I took it up. He did warn that its “tortuously conjectural rationalism” is, well, tortuous, and I think that’s a fair assessment.

I don’t know why I love Fry’s commentary here so much. I loved it so much I made my college students listen to this shorter version and write about it. They seemed to enjoy it, partly because it was a good respite from my lecturing but mostly because they got to watch something on TV. Let’s face it, we all loved whenever the television was wheeled in on that cart.

I love this post because as a writer who sometimes splits his infinitives and ends sentences with prepositions, it’s nice to hear someone lament the “language mavens.” Language is always changing. It isn’t as fixed as a dictionary would leave you to believe.

Reading “The Language Instinct,” I can see where Fry was most inspired: the chapter on “The Language Mavens” and “The Tower of Babel.” “The Language Mavens” focuses on pedants and why language is not as fixed. It changes over time. In addition, many of the grammar rules we are subjected to are not rules after all, but are based on false premises, primarily the assumption that English is like Latin; it isn’t.

Those two chapters, to me, especially the former, are easily worth 5 stars. The rest of the book is not as captivating.

This was the second book on language I read after John McWhorter’s “Words on the Move,” which was fantastic. That book was more accessible and much more fun, with a fairly similar concept, though it goes into more detail about the ways in which language changes over time, hence the title.

In “The Language Instinct,” there was some information on primitive language models (like LLMs). This was interesting. It’s crazy how primitive language models were, and how, in 30 years, they have worked out the ability to write in a way that appears to understand a user’s question. In an added last chapter for a later edition, Gary Marcus is mentioned, as we know Marcus is a leading critic of LLMs.

The Verdict

Language is fascinating, and there are a lot of valuable insights here that can help you better understand the state of linguistics (well, from decades ago), but also ourselves and, honestly, how wonderful and adaptive we are as a species to be able to communicate in a language with infinite expression. A language that is perhaps instinct.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

★★★½