| The psychologist Steven Pinker combines his interests in language and human nature in this fascinating study of the ways in which we create and use words - and what they reveal about ourselves and how we grasp reality. Exploring the semantics of ordinary language - news headlines, legal disputes, jokes, people's names - he argues that our thoughts are built around certain core ideas, such as space, force, kinship and contamination, and the metaphors and combinations we use reach back to these primal concepts.
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