Yet it was finding words, what Winton calls "the enormous luxury of language", that took him from being a 13-year-old boy who watched strangers through the eye of a rifle – a boy who was "obviously insecure and feeling threatened and probably not quite one with the world" – to a well-adjusted adult.
"I think actors' brains are like musicians' in that they've been trained to learn enormous sections of language not by rote but by imaginative association," she told me before going into the scanner.
This property allows a restricted number of meaningless units (such as those 40 or so sounds we are able to produce using our vocal chords) to be combined to produce billions of different words, giving language enormous flexibility.
Closer to home, Khanna has this provocative thought: The United States should offer Mexico the same deal it wants the Europeans to offer Turkey: inclusion, citizenship, open migration, enormous subsidies and language rights.
Unless Hello-Hello and Rocket Languages make enormous strides quickly, however, it'll be hard to catch Living Language.
All humans are rational, speak a language of enormous expressive power, and live in, maintain, and transmit to their young a complex social and moral order.
Given such inaccuracies and the enormous shifts in Russian language and culture that have taken place since the publication of "Over the Abyss in Rye," you might expect that a new translation of Salinger's novel would be greeted with enthusiasm.
Perhaps it is a book that needs careful handling by teachers at high school and even university level as they put it in its larger discursive context, explain how the irony works, and the enormous harm that racist language can do.
Achieving machine understanding of human language has enormous practical value and a lot of research goes into automated text analysis - which is often based on statistical properties.
With enough people, you can make the room do almost anything: draw or describe pictures, translate or correct any language, factor enormous numbers.
