Before reading "Grammar Puss" by Steven Pinker, read the following statements and decide whether you think they are true or false:

1. All societies have complex language, and everywhere the languages use the  same  kinds  of grammatical  machinery  like nouns, verbs, auxiliaries, and agreement.
2. All normal children develop language without conscious effort or formal lessons, and by the age of three they  speak in   fluent   grammatical   sentences,  outperforming  the  most sophisticated computers.
3. Brain damage or congenital conditions can make a person a linguistic savant  while  severely retarded,  or  unable  to  speak normally despite high intelligence.
4. Many scientists,  beginning  with  the  linguist Noam  Chomsky  in  the  late  1950's,  conclude  that there are specialized circuits in the human brain, and perhaps specialized  genes,  that  create  the gift of articulate speech.
5. The words rule and grammar have very different meanings to a scientist and to a layperson.
6. The  rules  people learn  (or  more  likely,  fail  to  learn) in school are called [prescriptive] rules, prescribing how one "ought"  to  talk.
7. Scientists  studying  language propose  [descriptive]  rules,  describing  how  people [do] talk -- the way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people  who  speak the language and ask them.
8. To  a  scientist,  the  fundamental  fact  of  human  language  is  its sheer improbability since most objects in the universe -- rocks, trees, worms, cows, cars --  cannot  talk.
9. So there is no contradiction, after all, in saying that every  normal  person can  speak  grammatically  (in the sense of systematically) and ungrammatically (in the sense of nonprescriptively), just  as  there  is  no  contradiction  in saying  that  a  taxi  obeys  the  laws  of  physics  but  breaks  the  laws of Massachusetts
10. Forcing modern speakers of English to not -- whoops, not to  split an  infinitive  because  it  isn't  done  in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and  togas.
11. Julius  Caesar could not have split an infinitive if he had wanted to. In Latin the infinitive is a single word like [facere], a  syntactic  atom.
12.  But once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Inside the educational and writing establishments,  the  rules survive  by  the  same  dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations and college fraternity hazing.
13. Anyone daring to overturn a rule by example must always worry that readers will think he or she is ignorant of the rule,  rather than  challenging it.
14. Frequently the language mavens claim that nonstandard American English is not just  different,  but less sophisticated and logical.
15. One fifth of all English verbs were originally nouns
16. Sometimes the "correct" past tense of fly is flied, not flew.
17. Sometimes the "correct" past tense of ring is ringed, not rang.
18. Sometimes the "correct" past tense of grandstand is grandstanded.

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