Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

that we have a third-person singular. The -5 in he buys, relative to they buy, gives you no more information than if we just dropped the -s altogether and relied on the subject alone. The sentence These three dogs are retrievers conveys the notion of plurality not once but five times — in pluralizing the demonstrative pronoun {these as opposed to this), in the numeral {three), in the plural noun (dogs versus dog), in the verb (are versus is), and a final time in the final noun (retrievers versus retriever). In languages like Italian or Latin, which routinely omit subjects, a third-person plural marker makes sense; in English, which requires subjects, the third-person plural marker often adds nothing. Meanwhile, the phrase Johns picture, which uses the possessive -'s, is ambiguous in at least three ways. Does it refer to a picture John took of someone else (say, his sister)? A photo that someone else (say, his sister) took of him? Or a picture of something else altogether (say, a blue-footed booby, Sula nebouxii), taken by someone else (perhaps a photographer from National Geographic), which John merely happens to own?

And then there's vagueness. In the sentence It's warm outside, there's no clear boundary between what counts as warm and what counts as not warm. Is it 70 degrees? 69? 68? 67? I can keep dropping degrees, but where do we draw the line? Or consider a word like heap. How many stones does it take to form a heap? Philosophers like to amuse themselves with the following mind-twister, known as a sorites (rhymes with pieties) paradox:

Clearly, one stone does not make a heap. If one stone is not enough to qualify as a heap of stones, nor should two, since adding one stone to a pile that is not a heap should not turn that pile into a heap. And if two stones don't make a heap, three stones shouldn't either — by a logic that seemingly ought to extend to infinity. Working in the opposite direction, a man with 10,000 hairs surely isn't bald. But just as surely, plucking one hair from a man who is not bald should not produce a transition from notbald to bald. So if a man with 9,999 hairs cannot be judged to be bald, the same should apply to a man with 9,998. Following the logic to its extreme, hair by hair, we are ultimately unable even to call a man with zero hairs "bald."

If the boundary conditions of words were more precise, such reasoning (presumably fallacious) might not be so tempting.

Adding to the complication is the undeniable fact that languages just can't help but change over time. Sanskrit begat Hindi and Urdu; Latin begat French, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan. West Germanic begat Dutch, German, Yiddish, and Frisian. English, mixing its Anglo-Saxon monosyllables (Halt!) with its Greco-Latin impress-your-friends polysyllables (Abrogate all locomotion!), is the stepchild of French and West Germanic, a little bit country, a little bit rock-and-roll.

Even where institutions like l'Acadיmie franחaise try to legislate language, it remains unruly. L'Acadיmie has tried to bar from French such English-derived as le hamburger, le drugstore, le week-end, le strip-tease, le pull-over, le tee-shirt, le chewing gum, and la cover-girl — with no success whatsoever. With the rapid development of popular new techonology — such as iPods, podcasts, cell phones, and DVDs

— the world needs new words every day.*

Most of us rarely notice the instability or vagueness of language, even when our words and sentences aren't precise, because we can decipher language by supplementing what grammar tells us with our knowledge of the world. But the fact that we can rely on something other than language — such as shared background knowledge — is no defense. When I "know what you mean" even though you haven't said it, language itself has fallen short. And when languages in general show evidence of these same problems, they reflect not only

*Perhaps even more galling to Franco-purists is that their own fabrique de Nמmes became known in English as "denim" — only to return to France as simply les blue jeans in the mother tongue. There are barbarians at the gate, and those barbarians are us.

cultural history but also the inner workings of the creatures who learn and use them.