From NYRB, Colin McGinn reviews Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (and more and more and more and more and interview). From Seed, an article on the evolution of language: What songbirds, dancing, and knot-tying can tell us about why we speak. From The Chronicle, some colleges are working to keep American Indian languages from becoming a lost part of history. Vigil for the vanishing tongue: Every few weeks, one of the world’s 7,000 or so languages falls out of use. But there’s still time to thumb through the vanishing world dictionary. A Browser's Paradise: A review of Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Sixth Edition). One of the week's best invented words: Whimperative: “Would you mind reviewing the last 10 years of quarterly sales reports this weekend?” Small object of grammatical desire: It's small, flat, black - and the hyphen is disappearing from the dictionary. Why? (and more on A Farewell to Hyphens). Case study: Never mind about the hyphen: what has happened to capital letters? In a world of txtspk they don't seem necessary. Ruthann Robson (CUNY): Footnotes: A Story of Seduction.
