Through the Language Glass

You don't get as many impressive cocktail-party stories as you would hope (“and that's why French-speakers ...!”). But Deutscher writes entertaining, and he is especially thorough. His task is to take the field of linguistic relativity - which has gotten itself into trouble by boasting with too big claims early on - and bring it back to a level of credibility. His careful study of the field's history, its early failures and its more recent small successes (word genders influencing associations, the russian blues, egocentric vs geographic coordinates) show in parallel the difficult history of devising empirical experiments dealing with the human mind that avoid any form of priming or vagueness.