Social network

I don't get it: the movie was lauded, Ebert included (he gave it 4 stars), and I didn't much like it. Yes, the protagonist is a spark of a social revolution, amoral, very smart, and the movie captures his development of a computerized environment that has become a social phenomenon – as well as his absolute lack of scruples, loyalty, or values. Yes, this is a modern phenomenon, and the film captures it. Yet in the end the film is an old-fashioned morality tale told in a modern way, and not much more. Fine enough – certainly better than a lot of other stuff. (See above).

Books on Language

April 17, 2009, 6:55 P.M. ET
Books on Language
by MICHAEL QUINION

1. The Stories of English 427 C [420s in Dewey are English & Old English; 427 is for variations]
By David Crystal
Overlook, 2004

This richly textured, nontechnical account of the evolution of English is fascinating because it interweaves multiple narratives. In parallel with the standard language, David Crystal discusses varieties usually considered nonstandard -- dialect, slang and the speech of ethnic minorities -- which previously hadn't received the same level of attention. Traditionalist speakers and grammarians deplore such varieties as inferior or corrupt, but they are increasingly becoming accepted as legitimate, not least because only one in three speakers of English now has it as a mother tongue. With a cornucopia of examples that range from "The Canterbury Tales" to "The Lord of the Rings," and from the correspondence of medieval kings to Internet chatroom gossip, Crystal's exposition is a delight.


2. Language in Danger 417.7 D [410s are Linguistics; 417 is Dialectology & historical linguistics]
By Andrew Dalby
Columbia University, 2003
Languages not only change, they also die: World-wide, a language vanishes on average every two weeks. Andrew Dalby argues that each disappearance diminishes us, because a language encapsulates local knowledge and ways of looking at the human condition that die with the last speaker. Stronger languages squeeze out others: An early example is the language extinction that occurred around the Mediterranean in classical times, through the rise of Latin. Closer to our own time, minority languages -- Irish, Welsh, Native American and Australian tongues -- were banned in school to force minority groups to speak the language of the majority. The mood is now swinging toward encouraging minority languages, and some of those in danger may be saved. Dalby's engrossing account documents endangered languages throughout the world.


3. The Thurber Carnival 817 T [810s are American Literature; 817 is Satire & humor]
By James Thurber
Harper, 1945
James Thurber's antic attitude to language was a revelation when, at age 12, I bought this compilation of essays and stories in a British paperback edition. I first understood that grammar could actually be interesting when I read "Here Lies Miss Groby," his recollection of an English-composition teacher who drilled into her charges that metonymy means "Container for the Thing Contained," as in the phrase "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" -- "ears" is not meant literally; their hearing is. Young Thurber lies awake at night wondering about a wife threatening to hit her husband with the milk -- would "milk" be a case of Thing Contained for the Container? Thurber's whimsical drawings are a joy -- one has a puzzled man sitting on a motionless sled, holding his dog on a leash, as a passing skater, apparently steeped in Swinburne's poetry, shouting: "I said the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, but let it pass, let it pass!" I am glad to have encountered Thurber's storytelling skills and his humor so early in life.




4. Words and Rules 400 P [400s are Language]
By Steven Pinker
Basic Books, 1999

When Americans prefer "snuck" and "dove" to the British "sneaked" and "dived," they're pointing up one of the curiosities of English: the battle between regular and irregular verbs. These two American usages are especially odd because they're 19th-century revivals, reversing what grammarians often assert is an unstoppable historical trend toward regularization. The battle of the verbs can be especially vexing for children, who are avid for rules when they learn a language -- rules that lead to errors such as "breaked" and "holded." Steven Pinker's research confirms that we actually use two tools for making words: rules and memory. Regular verbs pop into mind almost automatically; irregular ones take longer to process because they must be retrieved from memory. Pinker's "Words and Rules" is erudite, readable and funny, leading the reader through a great range of topics, one of which is the cause of the gradual transformation of language over time.

5. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress SF Heinlein
By Robert Heinlein
Putnam, 1966
Science fiction has invented much vocabulary -- "robot," "force field" and "spacesuit," for instance -- that has since reached the mainstream. And linguistic change itself has been a significant sub-theme in many science-fiction works, partly because it contributes to the sense of otherness that is key to the suspension of disbelief, partly because it is a useful indicator of social and cultural distinctness. Anthony Burgess's anglicized Russian slang in "A Clockwork Orange" and George Orwell's Newspeak in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" are two famous examples. Another memorable example is Robert Heinlein's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress." With a sentient computer as a main character, the story is set in a lunar penal colony in 2075, where the inhabitants speak in an English dialect influenced by Russian and Chinese: not yet a pidgin, certainly not yet a creole, but a form of speech indicative of the changes that happen when disparate language communities are forced to communicate.

Mr. Quinion's most recent book, "Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of Our Vanishing Vocabulary" (Oxford), has just been published in paperback.

Books on the Brilliantly Disturbed

1. A Beautiful Mind

By Sylvia Nasar
Simon & Schuster, 1998

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in the lives of schizophrenics. Once entrenched, paranoia rarely lifts. Thus the resurrection of mathematician and economist John Nash is a tale for the ages. While Nash's conversation as a young man had "always mixed mathematics and myth," by the late 1950s the MIT professor was going far beyond eccentricity. He talked of becoming the emperor of Antarctica; he also insisted that aliens were communicating to him through the New York Times. Nash spent the next three and a half decades as a revolving-door psychiatric in-patient and aimless wanderer. But after receiving the 1994 Nobel Prize for his long-ago dissertation on game theory, the former boy wonder miraculously regained his appetite for scientific study. Sylvia Nasar's "A Beautiful Mind" is less schmaltzy and tidy than the Oscar-winning movie based on it. The Hollywood version suggests that Nash benefited from new medications, but as Nasar reports, Nash actually stopped taking antipsychotics in 1970 and relied solely on his potent mind. "Gradually," Nash recalled, "I began to reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking."

2. The Man Who Loved China
By Simon Winchester
Harper, 2008

Best known for his gripping narrative about the odd couple behind the Oxford English Dictionary ("The Professor and the Madman"), Simon Winchester here portrays the hypomanic, chain-smoking Brit who produced an immense encyclopedic work all by his lonesome. In 1936, Joseph Needham, a noted biochemist and ladies man, fell in love with a young scholar from Nanjing who taught him classical Chinese. "Almost delirious with happiness" from creating his own personal English-Chinese dictionary, this "20th century Erasmus" then sought to rescue China from its lowly status as "the booby nation." Needham's magnum opus -- he produced 17 volumes before his death in 1994 -- was called "Science and Civilisation in China," and it argued that the Middle Kingdom was once way ahead of the West. Printing, for example, came six centuries before Gutenberg. Winchester spotlights Needham's perilous research trips, which brought him into contact with Chairman Mao and Zhou Enlai, as well as his colorful non-academic obsessions, including gymnosophy (i.e., nudism), Morris dancing and burnt toast.

3. Empire
By Donald Bartlett and James Steele
Norton, 1979

Nearly a full generation before Leonardo DiCaprio did his star turn in "The Aviator," Donald Bartlett and James Steele punctured the myth that once was Howard Hughes. Today it's easy to forget that Hughes's name was, for a long time, synonymous solely with gargantuan achievement. "Nobody can outdo me," the 25-year-old movie producer proclaimed shortly after taking Hollywood by storm with "Hell's Angels" (1930), an early talkie, which he also directed. Eight years later, the dashing mogul became a national hero when he shattered the record for flying around the world by a full three days. Bartlett and Steele, having sifted through 250,000 pages of documents, detail every chilling twist and turn of Hughes's descent into emotional paralysis. By the late 1960s, just about all the lonely billionaire ("Don't dare call me millionaire!") looked forward to was sitting naked in the middle of hotel rooms -- "the germ-free zone."

4. The Difference Engine
By Doron Swade
Viking, 2001

In 1822, disgusted by human error, the 30-year-old Cambridge-educated mathematician Charles Babbage dreamed up a cure: a calculating machine. After his annus horribilis of 1827, in which he lost a son as well as his wife and father, Babbage was inconsolable. To avoid a complete breakdown, he threw himself into working on a mechanical computer that he called the "difference engine." A few years later, he completed a part of Difference Engine No. 1, a 15-ton contraption that he used as a demonstration piece. Unfortunately, Babbage's obsession produced mountains of elaborate drawings for uncompleted machines but little else except bitterness. According to one of his few friends, the aging loner "spoke as if he hated mankind in general, Englishmen in particular and the English government most of all." Though as Doron Swade, a curator at the Science Museum in London, memorably shows in "The Difference Engine," this indefatigable misanthrope was the grandfather of the computer age.

5. Wizard
By Marc Seifer
Birch Lane, 1996

A century before cellphones and the Internet, another "wireless revolution" turned America upside-down. Its chief theoretician was Nikola Tesla, a Serb from Croatia, who secured the first patent for a means to produce high-frequency radio waves. Tesla was considered, along with Thomas Edison, one of the "twin wizards of electricity," Marc Seifer writes in this absorbing biography. Right after arriving in Manhattan in 1884, Tesla began working 20-hour days at Edison's lab; when his boss nixed his alternating-current induction motor, Tesla set out on his own. Seifer's meticulously researched account, some 20 years in the making, features riveting anecdotes of this man about town who hobnobbed with both Mark Twain and Stanford White. Like Howard Hughes, Tesla was a germo-phobe who called the hotel room home. But the room number had to be divisible by three, and he required assurances that no hotel employee would get within three feet of him. Sworn to celibacy, the anorexic Tesla saved up his passion for pigeons: "To care for those . . . birds . . . is the delight of my life. It is my only means of playing."

Mr. (Joshua) Kendall's biography of Peter Roget, "The Man Who Made Lists," has just been released in paperback.