Using Our Words: What Language Tells Us About the Human Brain

I’ve been fascinated by words for as long as I can remember. As a student at Oxford University I delighted in the discovery of A.J. Sheard’s The Words We Use, in which I discovered that language can be like archeology, teaching us about the way our ancestors lived and thought. Knowing that Lord derives from hlaford (“loaf guarder”) and Lady derives from hlǣfdige (“loaf kneader”) tells us something about the mindset of those Anglo-Saxons who lived well over a thousand years ago.

We can also use words to learn about ourselves, much as we can learn quite a lot about an animal by observing its tracks and analyzing its spoor. Words can reveal the way our brains work and enable us to see some of our many cognitive limitations.

Applying basic evolutionary theory, it’s easy to speculate that we’ll have fairly precise words for things of fundamental importance to our survival but far less precise words for more abstract concerns. When we look at vocabulary, in every language, that is indeed what we find.

To see why this should be so, imagine if we had in all human languages a single word color. I tell my daughter to go and see if the fruit on the tree nearby is ripe enough to eat. “See if the fruit is color,” I tell her.

Not very helpful.

So we have instead our palette of words: red, orange, green, blue, and so on. Some languages have a few more words and some have a few less, depending on local need. Russian, for example, distinguishes between dark blue синий and light blue голубой and we can infer that at some point in the past those who spoke the ancestor language found the distinction between the two colors of sufficient importance to create words to enable the distinction.

For the most part, however, our words can be vague and still have sufficient utility. We can say that a rock is hard and grass is soft without needing greater specificity. Scientific disciplines invariably create their own sub-branches of language because in science our usual vague generalizations are inadequate. The rest of us, however, are quite happy to be vague nearly all of the time.

Unfortunately, as our world becomes increasingly complex due to a small number of clever people creating astonishing…