Our difficulties in understanding or effectuatingcommunication with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world.

She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. "Misanthrope" is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men.And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: "misogynist." But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

I would expect a significant development and elaboration of language in only a few generations if all the chimps unable to communicate were to die or fail to reproduce. Basic English corresponds to about 1,000 words. Chimpanzees are already accomplished in vocabularies exceeding 10 percent of that number.

Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, "Gentlemen, let's proceed," and sensing Ellie's frown would add, "Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys." The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female.

Human spoken language seems to beadventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities.

Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence.

No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that's one of its functions - so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.

But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.