It really is a hard thing to come up with something original these days. That proverbial bucket in the sea of knowledge is a constant bitching reminder that no matter how much you read and learn, you won’t be able to match the billions of Google’s indexed pages.

Makes you wonder how difficult it really is to write a dissertation these days. I consider myself pretty well-read given my age for my field locally. And yet there’s still a lot of material that I am aware of and have not read, and material that that I haven’t even thought existed despite the thousands of bibliographic entries I’ve browsed. I hate to admit it but I’ve just recently come across Steven Pinker who is, by specialization a psychologist, but anchors many of his arguments on language.

And boy, how I hate myself for only reading about him just now. Quite a lot of my interests in language studies are actually dealt by his works – game theory, pragmatics, and even physics in language. Yes, physics! (Check this video of his talk at Google where he discusses ideas from his book The Stuff of Thought.)

That had me thinking about that joke I had in our graduate class in Semantics about establishing a field on “quantum linguistics.” I argued that deixis and tense can be related to the concepts of space and time. When I was joking about it, I wondered if that was an original idea. Turns out, it isn’t. According to Pinker there’s “space in our prepositions, matter in nouns, time tenses, and causality in verbs.” Humble pie for me.

Still, this has me thinking. How much original and world-changing thought can be conjured up by an ordinary mind? Perhaps that’s the reason why God only sends a genius like Einstein once a century. Maybe the world won’t just be able to deal with such revolutionary ideas if they come plenty and quick in between. The rest of us are just plain bound for mental mediocrity.

Check out these other posts:

1. Computational linguistics in the Philippines, anyone?
2. On prescriptivism… again
3. Critical discourse analysis and blogging
4. Pirated scholarship
5. How does one delimit a blog post?