ABSTRACT
One "cognitive scientist" sees not only the "Universal Grarnmar" of Chomsky but goes on to pay lyrical tribute to every ingenious form of human babble and burble, from the garbled patter of baby talk to the fractured chatter of half-illiterates. It is all part of a seamless web, the cognitive triumph, and "a system of great richness and beauty." Pinker quotes Chomsky's semantic truth as "Virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe." So it is that all sentences become equal in space. This applies to even the notorious syntax-fracturing professional athlete and the, you know, like, inarticulate teenage skateboarder. The dissenting suspicions here are those of Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, one of the few writers on the Times who take some trouble with the sentences he writes. The criticism is deepened by the new and lackadaisical attitudes to a current cliche "life-style.".
