Chances are that most educated people interested in language have heard of linguists like Deborah Tannen (author of You Just Don't Understand and Talking from 9 to 5) and John McWhorter (author of The Word on the Street and All About the Beat), whose mass-market books have made a variety of language topics accessible to a wide audience. But probably the best-known of these popularizers is Steven Pinker. As part of a distinguished career as a professor of psychology at MIT and (currently) Harvard and former director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, he has written both technical, specialist-oriented texts ...