When you write “…could [anyone] suggest any authors that deal with this topic…” I am only guessing that your unspecified “topic…” refers to cognitive science, brain functions, etc. But, I’m not entirely sure.

I can suggest a book that addresses the shortcomings most of us have with the trickiness and (it appears) the fickleness of the English language. I suggest that you look for a copy, easy to find and plentiful, of John Simon’s “Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline.” I also suggest that you do not use quotation marks around the title of a book, as I have just done, but instead find the correct manner of indicating that a title IS of a book, rather than, perhaps, a magazine article. I’m not sure what the correct practice is when one quotes from a book and has no idea whether italics or underlining will make it through the limitations of a word processing program.

But, DO find the book and read it. Mr. Simon came to English, I believe, as his fifth language and has earned his daily bread for many years now as film and theater critic for various publications, including forty or so years as theater critic for “New York Magazine,” after what he has referred to as a “misspent youth” as a college professor here and there.

His book tutors national English literacy and, along the way, provides more chuckles and outright belly laughs than I can describe in this short comment. His style is curmudgeonly and acerbic at times, but he fairly compliments the artists’ who have worked hard to display excellence in their chosen professions, whether in acting, writing, set design, costumes, music, or any other part of a film or play on stage.

Read his book and never again will you stumble over “lay” and “lie,” substitute “disinterested” for “uninterested,” or make the mistake of using “enormity” when you actually mean “enormousness.”

Best wishes and I find it absolutely wonderful that someone still cares about the health of the language of Shakespeare.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone could suggest any authors that deal with this topic. I’ve read Steven Pinker, Cordelia Fine, Thomas Kida, Susan Blackmore, and of course Mr. Shermer — I am always on the look-out for more.

But I wanna hijack this thread and talk aboot Ben Stein……

Lately, I’ve been reading several books on the brain and the way it influences our behavior and decision making. This article certainly compliments the theory of memes as well as other aspects of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. It’s interesting, at least to me, to observe in people how this same “freedom” of choice interacts with the memes that our mirror neurons allow us to imitate.

This material can be disheartening to some people. I’ve often compared it to the idea of a watch suddenly achieving consciousness only to realize that it’s only function in life is to tell time. “Genes and memes” I’ll tell people, imitating machines whose sole purpose in life is to procreate. This is what they find disheartening, that we are only machines. But, I continue, we are the only animals/machines on the earth that can actually go against our biology (in fact, this ability seems to come from those same genes and memes) — think of people who commit suicide, either for psychological or political and religious reasons.