Pinker: “Words Don’t Mean What They Mean”

In his essay, Steven Pinker uses examples to show how “words don’t mean what they mean.” Examples that he used that stood out to me were when he referred to specific events in a movie, called Tootsie, and a tv show, called Seinfeld, to point out that people literally don’t say what they mean. Pinker says, “Make too blatant a request, as in Tootsie, and the hearer is offended; too subtle, as in Seinfeld, and it can go over the hearer’s head.” In Tootsie, Pinker tells us that the main guy character is dressed like a girl and the girl he likes tells him that she wishes a guy would just tell her that he wanted to make love to her, instead of trying to use a dumb pick-up line. The main guy character comes to the girl later in the movie and does exactly that and gets slapped across the face. In the tv show, Seinfeld, the main character, George, gets asked by his date if he would like to come up to have some coffee after their night out and he declines because coffee keeps him up at night. Later in the episode he realizes that ‘coffee’ in the context she used didn’t mean coffee; it meant sex. I think most people, including myself, have found themselves in similar situations as both of these examples. Sometimes my girlfriend will be brutally honest with me and tell me that my breath stinks; of course I take offense to this, as the girl in the Tootsie example did when the guy blatantly told her that he wanted to make love to her. Other times, however, my girlfriend will offer me gum out of the blue and I will gladly take the gum, not thinking of any specific reason why she would offer it to me, and because I enjoy gum. Later I will realize it was because she thought I had stinky breath, but she didn’t want to be blunt about telling me about it, just like George’s date in Seinfeld didn’t want to be blunt about wanting to have sex with him.