Steven Pinker - What Our Lanuage Habits Reveal

https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_language_and_thought

• Language change - descriptive attitudes towards language.
• Prescriptive/Descriptive.
• Language emerges from our human minds, interacting with one another.
• Visible in unstoppable change in language: slang, jargon, historical change, dialect, divergence, language formation.
• Communication Model - sender, message, receiver.
• Words used in different ways/have different meanings in different contexts.
• We use euphemistic language when speaking about awkward subjects, e.g. drugs, sex, using the toilet.
  
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