The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“This is about language more generally, but it has a great chapter on swearing. It’s a really good shorter summary, where he hits all the highlights about swearing and physiology in terms of how it works in the brain and the effects it has on your body.” Read more...

The best books on Swearing

Melissa Mohr, Linguist

“In this book he analyses how our words relate to our thoughts and to the world around us, and what that tells us about ourselves. You could say he is probing the mysteries of humanity and our nature through how we use words. That sounds a bit metaphysical, but as a writer Pinker is always grounded in a very real and sophisticated knowledge of psychology. He’s done a lot of research into cognition and language so there is a bedrock of science there. He is at the same time a really enjoyable, whimsical writer. He’s the sort of writer who one moment will be talking about some rather recondite academic squabble or curious feature of language, and the next will drop references to Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce and Tom Lehrer.” Read more...

The best books on Language

Henry Hitchings, Linguist