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two articles about the world’s top intellectual: a “for” and an “against” Chomsky. On the “for” side Robin Blackburn wrote that Chomsky had transformed an entire field of inquiry and likened him to the child who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes. On the “against” side Oliver Kamm spoke of Chomsky’s “dubious arguments leavened with extravagant rhetoric.” 1
    This latest burst of attention is merely one of many. Chomsky has been famous in several worlds for a long time. Within the university there are apocryphal Chomsky stories. It’s said that graduate students would sometimes come to their meetings with him in pairs, so they could take turns, trying to keep up. His weekly seminars are legendary. Over the decades, they have been attended not just by MIT graduates but also by an ever-changing cast of unfamiliar students, whom none of the regulars knew. Time and again, so the story goes, the outsiders would try to beard the lion in his den, and Chomsky would swat them one by one. By now, it has to have become tiresome.
    Until 2002, and in some ways even since then, Chomsky’s exact position on the evolution of language was hotly contested, but both sides in the debate would at least agree on this: for many years Chomsky deemed language evolution unworthy of investigation, and given the extraordinary nature of his influence, his pronouncement was as deadening as any formal ban. Now, he has decided, it is feasible to study the topic.
     
     
     
    Before Chomsky, most linguists were field linguists, researchers who journeyed into uncharted territory and broke bread with the inhabitants. They had no dictionary or phrase book but learned the local language, working out how verbs connect with objects and subjects, and how all types of meaning are conveyed. They have always been seen as adventurers, but the soul of a field linguist is really that of a botanist. When they transcribe a language for the first time, they create a rigorous catalog of sounds, words, and parts of speech, called the grammar of the language. Once this is completed, they match one catalog to another—finding evidence of family relationships between languages. Grammar writers are meticulous and diligent, arranging and rearranging the specimens of language into a lucid system. 2
    In the early 1950s, Chomsky submitted a grammar of Hebrew for his master’s thesis at MIT. At the same time he was also at work on a huge manuscript titled The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, in which he wrote about grammar in the abstract. 3 Instead of describing an actual language, Chomsky discussed the different ways that a language can be described. He submitted one chapter of this effort for his Ph.D. thesis, but it was so different from the way linguists typically thought and worked that many academics who read it didn’t really know what to do with it. 4 In 1954 Morris Halle, an MIT professor famous for his work on the sounds of language, wrote to Roman Jakobson, another famous linguist: “I am very impressed with Noam’s ability as a linguist; he has a wonderful head on his shoulders, if only he did not want to do all things in the most difficult way possible.” 5
    With his next project Chomsky moved even further away from the concerns of his colleagues. After receiving his doctorate, he got a part-time job at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. 6 He carried on with his work, taught linguistics, and, in order to make enough money, also taught German, French, philosophy, and logic. In 1957 Chomsky published the notes from his first linguistics course as Syntactic Structures .
    In that book he continued his examination of language in the abstract, discussing the grammars of languages in a wholly new way. Instead of simply being a catalog of all the words and sounds in a language, with instructions for how to put them together, a grammar, he argued, was really a theory of that language.
    As a theory, a grammar should be