Besides the sheer intellectual excitement and gratification afforded by
Steven Pinker's 2007 book,
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, I much enjoy his examples. Some are overtly political, as when he writes:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This sentence appeared in George W. Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003. It referred to intelligence reports suggesting that Saddam may have tried to buy five hundred tons of a kind of uranium ore called yellowcake...During the occupation it became clear that Saddam had had no facilities in place to manufacture nuclear weapons, and probably had never explored the possibility of buying yellowcake from Niger. In the words of placards and headlines all over the world, "Bush lied."
Did he? The answer is not as straightforward as partisans on both sides might think...
So did Bush lie? A strong case could be made that he did. When Bush said that the British government had "learned" that Saddam had sought uranium, he was committing himself to the proposition that the uranium seeking actually took place, not that the British government believed that it did....[pp. 6-8]
Other of Pinker's examples are simply curious...and informative:
Conundrums of causality are not just law-school exercises. On July 1, 1881, President James Garfield was waiting to board a train when Charles J. Guiteau took aim at him with a gun and shot him twice. Both bullets missed Garfield's major organs and arteries, but one lodged in the flesh of his back. The wound was minor by today's standards and needn't have been fatal even in Garfield's day. 
But his doctors subjected him to the harebrained medical practices of the time, like probing his wound with their unwashed hands (decades after antisepsis had been discovered) and feeding him through his rectum instead of his mouth. Garfield lost a hundred pounds as he lingered on his deathbed, succumbing to the effects of starvation and infection eighty days after the shooting. At his trial, Guiteau repeatedly said, "The doctors killed him; I just shot him." The jury was unpersuaded, and in 1882 Guiteau was hanged—another man whose fate hinged on the semantics of a verb.[pp. 86-87]
An earlier page of Pinker's book had made a subtle reference to the identity of the other man. The verb in that case was "is."
Besides the sheer intellectual excitement and gratification afforded by Steven Pinker's 2007 book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, I much enjoy his examples. Some are overtly political, as when he writes:
