The Language Mavens By Steven Pinker

Language is one of few things that makes human differ from the rest of the animals. There are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today, and all of them consist of sound, and meaning which paired up by grammar. Every language has a grammar, regardless of how simple or how complicated they are, when you compare them with each other. You can roughly group grammar into 2 types, prescriptive and descriptive. Just like what Steven Pinker wrote in his The Language Mavens, prescriptive rules are “the rules people learn in school, it prescribes how one ought to talk,” whereas descriptive rules “describes how people do talk.”
A prescriptive rule of grammar is what people often were taught at school, it is like a standard of the language people …show more content…
For instance, Double Negative, which is used very often especially the Southern part of the United States, is often regard as uneducated, and redneck. Double negative occurs when people use two negative words or constructions within a single clause, and they cancel one another out and mean a weaker negative. For instance, the phrase “I ain't doing nothing,” means I am not doing anything. They don’t cancel each other out to mean a positive, like in math, double negative means positive. It is used widely in our daily lives. For instance, in the "Stinking Badges" scene of John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), at the scene, when Dobbs said that “If you're the police, then where are your badges?” and later Gold Hat reply to him that “Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!” Using double negative here is a lot better than the “correct grammar,” since it really make the audience feel the character is close to them, just like an average Joe that lives next to …show more content…
We have no badges. We don't need badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!” methinks that the first one is way better than the second since it really brings more character in to Gold Hat, simply because it is how a lot of people actually talk in their daily lives. Maybe the second one is what most people taught how they ought to speak, but the first one is how they might have actually speak with their mom, dad, or even friends. Double Negative really adds up more emotion to the same scene, and it brings more richness into the characteristic of the character. Moreover just the world of 1984, everyone is taught to speak the same way, act the same way, and behave the same way. The world of 1984 is less fun and diverse, and even