| ADAM'S TONGUE How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans Derek Bickerton New York: Hill and Wang, 2009 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8090-2281-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8090-2281-8 | 286pp. | HC | $27.50 | |
| Page 25: | "Every other species took countless millions of years to develop rudimentary communications systems tied inexorably to the things they needed to do in order to survive. Our species in a tiny fraction of that time developed a vastly more complex system just so that we could do things we already did, and that other species did too, better than those other species could do them. Put in such stark terms, no one who believes in evolution is going to buy this." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "Put this in such stark terms, and it wouldn't be bought by anyone who believes in evolution." |
| Page 29: | "One the one hand, as songwriters Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen pointed out, 'You don't have to know the language' provided that the moon is shining and the girl has that certian expression in her eyes." |
| Spelling: S/B "certain". |
| Page 123: | "Schick and Dezzani started cutting anyway and were 'amazed ... as a small lava flake sliced through the steel gray skin." |
| Not as bad as "gray steel skin" but still a mistake: S/B "steel-gray skin". |
| Page 147: | "Is 'Out of Africa' out the window?, a headline in Science demanded." |
| Not a demand, but a question. |
| Page 190: | "...and the menial details of how they started talking, how, with all those concepts whizzing around in their heads, they got to agree on how to label them, gets swept under the rug." |
| Number error: S/B "get". |
| Page 221: | "In this way, developing the high-end scavenging niche would have both created new words and deployed old words in new contexts, further weakening the uncoupling of words from situations, from current occurrence—even from fitness." |
| Word choice: S/B "strengthening" or "fostering". |
| Page 233: | "...you need a large cohort of nerve cells synchronously sending ut the same message if you're to overcome the distortion and degradation that inevitably involves some individual cells." |
| Number error: S/B "involve" or better yet "affect". (Both the number errors involve two consecutive "s" sounds. Could there be transcription from a voice recording be to blame?) |
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