One Of The Things That People Complain

What A Dull Universe It Would Be If Everything In It Conformed To Our Expectations, If It Held Nothing To Surprise Or Baffle Us Or Confound Our Common Sense. A Century Ago No One Foresaw The Existence Of Black Holes, An Expanding Universe, Oceans On Jupiter's Moons, Or Dna. What Could Be More Enriching Than To Know That We Share A Common Origin With All Living Things, That We Are Kin To Chimpanzees, Redwoods And Mollusks? And Isn't It A Source Of Wonder To Realize That The Iron In Our Blood And The Calcium In Our Bones Were Created In The Bellies Of Supernovas?

As Many Political Writers Have Pointed Out, Commitment To Political Equality Is Not An Empirical Claim That People Are Clones.

People Are Under The Impression That Dictionaries Legislate Language. What A Dictionary Does Is Keep Track Of Usages Over Time.

Democracy Is An Imperfect Way Of Steering Between The Violence Of Anarchy And The Violence Of Tyranny, With The Least Violence You Can Get Away With.

I Spent 20 Years Doing Research On Regular And Irregular Verbs, Not Because I'm An Obsessive Language Lover But Because It Seemed To Me That They Tapped Into A Fundamental Distinction In Language Processing, Indeed In Cognitive Processing, Between Memory Lookup And Rule-driven Computation.