Unlike tlpounds, I enjoyed chapter 6. I was up in the middle of the night, and I read the entire chapter without falling asleep. In contrast to Chapter 2, the broader concepts involved with naming and Pinker's specific examples were each interesting. It helped that this chapter was easier to read than earlier chapters, because the concepts were less abstract and I've seen other philosophical discussions about what words mean.
For example, there have been arguments going back to Plato about whether a what word like "cat" means. There a lots of individual creatures, each of which can be considered a "cat". Does that categorization have a meaning outside the human mind? The nuanced perspective of Kripke and Putnam, which Pinker describes, seemed more appealing that the Platonic or Empirical extremes.
The section
Where do new words come from? was a neat topic. I've noticed various new words emerging during my lifetime, and Pinker had some solid insights about which words successfully entered the lexicon. Phonesthesia, which occur when "families of words share a teeny snatch of sound and a teeny shred of meaning", like nose-oriented words starting with "sn", was something I was vaguely aware of but hadn't read about before.
And the discussion of person's names was more satisfying than the similar chapter in
Freakonomics. The following phrase caught my eye, in part because I have a nephew named Max.
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