a little more McLuhan (& maybe Pynchon)

[alice wellintown]

Pinker does a wonderful job of explaining this to us regular folk who
may sometimes be caught in a Sears poncho and a pair of Python Snow
boots and I'm sure there are youtube videos, but the basic equation
has two parts. Part One is Saussure's part. Most of us know this part
as the "arbitrariness of the sign" or the wholly conventional pairing
of a sound with a meaning. Example, the word 'bird" does not look like
a bird, sing like a bird, walk or fly like a bird. It means bird
because when English speaking kids are growing up they learn to
associate the sound with the meaning. But this mental lexicon is not
language until we add Part Two, generative grammar. The grammar, not
the grammar you may have studied in school, but a mental grammar, a
set of rules that makes infinite use of finite media. Pinker
speculates about the possible association this discrete combinatorial
system may have to another one, DNA, but he draws no conclusions (at
least not in _The Language Instinct_).