Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.

Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men.

Effective education may also require co-opting old faculties to deal with new demands. . . Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun.

When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.