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Life of Noam
Tuesday, August 30th, 2005 03:49 pmFrom the excellent Language Log:
Disowning The Brothers Grimm
No, I don't want to disown Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, the first of whom is something of a hero of historical linguistics. I want to disown the movie The Brothers Grimm, and I'm doing this on behalf of linguists everywhere.
What the movie has in common with the real world is: two brothers named Grimm, early-19th-century Germans who were involved with fairy tales. As far as I can tell, that's it. Imagine a Life of Noam in which, through the miracle of miniaturization, the heroic Chomsky (played by Brad Pitt in a revealing latex bodysuit) takes a band of brawling adventurers into the deepest recesses of the human brain, to recover bits of the language organ for sale through his start-up company -- a sort of cerebral 21st-century Fantastic Voyage. Appalling.
Dude, that film would rock! However, it wouldn't be complete without an evil Count Lakoff lurking in the shadows of the sylvanian fissure, and tense scenes where Noam's companions, Jackendoff and Pinker, mutiny because Pinker is jealous that Chomsky is still getting the all the girls at the age of 93.
Disowning The Brothers Grimm
No, I don't want to disown Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, the first of whom is something of a hero of historical linguistics. I want to disown the movie The Brothers Grimm, and I'm doing this on behalf of linguists everywhere.
What the movie has in common with the real world is: two brothers named Grimm, early-19th-century Germans who were involved with fairy tales. As far as I can tell, that's it. Imagine a Life of Noam in which, through the miracle of miniaturization, the heroic Chomsky (played by Brad Pitt in a revealing latex bodysuit) takes a band of brawling adventurers into the deepest recesses of the human brain, to recover bits of the language organ for sale through his start-up company -- a sort of cerebral 21st-century Fantastic Voyage. Appalling.
Dude, that film would rock! However, it wouldn't be complete without an evil Count Lakoff lurking in the shadows of the sylvanian fissure, and tense scenes where Noam's companions, Jackendoff and Pinker, mutiny because Pinker is jealous that Chomsky is still getting the all the girls at the age of 93.
