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The Story of Human LanguageCourse

by John McWhorter

Who uses, recommends or left The Story of Human Language, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Kevin Simler
Writer and engineer behind the blog Melting Asphalt; co-author with Robin Hanson of The Elephant in the Brain.
recommended

John McWhorter, The Story of Human Language [audible.com lecture series]. Awesome lecture series. A more accurate title might be "The Sociology of Language." Discusses the way languages are used and how they evolve in human populations. Also, McWhorter is an excellent lecturer, one of my favorites. His sentences are precise, dense with information, and spiced with a nice, dry wit and colorful turns of phrase. Highly recommended.

His running "Reading Archive" page, where he logs each book, lecture series and podcast he finishes with a short verdict. The page carries no date; the newest entry on it is Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny (published February 2017), so it was last extended around then.

meltingasphalt.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.