Two years ago, a newspaper report from a scientific meeting read, "Ability to Learn Grammar Laid to Gene by Researcher." To psychologists and linguists, the notion that grammatical rules might be the inflexible products of strings of DNA molecules, rather than having been shaped by the nuances of a cultural milieu, was stunning, not to say heretical. To the syndicated columnist Erma Bombeck, however, it all made perfect sense.

Bombeck's husband once taught English in high school. "He had 37 grammar-gene deficients in his class at one time," she informed her readers. To them, she explained, "a comma could have been a petroglyph. A subjective complement was something you said to a friend when her hair came out right. A dangling participle was not their problem." And yet, Bombeck speculated, each and every one of these kids finished up as major sports figures, rock stars and television personalities, "who make millions spewing out words such as \o7 bummer, radical\f7 and \o7 awesome\f7 and thinking they are complete sentences."

Bombeck's observations aside, one of the great mysteries of human life is the fact that children learn language (not just words, but complicated grammatical structure) with amazing facility--yeah, like, I mean, really! In his "Patterns in the Mind," Ray Jackendoff refers to this as the Paradox of Language Acquisition. If linguists are so smart, how come they're so dumb that they can't do what kids of two can do while chucking food around the room and sticking their fingers into electrical outlets? That is, figure out the principles behind the grammatical patterns of various languages.

The nature of language has long fascinated scholars. \o7 Obsessed \f7 would be a more accurate description. And perhaps it's not surprising that scholars whose stock in trade is words should be able to employ them with such stinging effect against their academic adversaries: They do so at every opportunity.

There is a huge intellectual divide across which their carefully hewn invectives are hurled with such enthusiasm. On one side, there are those who believe that language acquisition is an innate process, which is fine tuned by the environment in early infancy. On the other side, children are viewed as acquiring language solely through learning, through attentive imitation of Motherese and other voices they hear in the babble about them.