December 7 : )

It's the birthday of the linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky, born in Philadelphia (1928). Though he's best known today for his leftist political writings, he's also known as the father of modern linguistics.

He grew up during the Great Depression, and growing up with poverty all around him left a deep impression. He said, "My earliest memories are of seeing people coming to the door selling rags; and in a trolley car with my mother, I saw people beating up women strikers outside a textile factory." His father was a Ukrainian immigrant and a famous Hebrew scholar. His family was one of the only Jewish families in the neighborhood, and he was surrounded by anti-Semitism. Some of his neighbors actually threw pro-Nazi beer parties in the late 1930s. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on his 13th birthday, his neighbors suddenly began to hate the Nazis, and Chomsky was fascinated by how quickly they could change their political sympathies.

He was reading newspapers every day at a young age, and as a teenager, he liked to spend his free time with an uncle he described as "a hunchback with a background in crime" who owned a newspaper stand on the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway in New York City. Chomsky would take a train from Philadelphia to New York and spend the day at the newsstand with his uncle, where Jewish intellectuals would show up to discuss political philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Chomsky got interested in linguistics in college at a time when most linguists believed that language is something children only learn through habit and practice. But Chomsky believed that language is something instinctive in human beings. He began working on a way of describing certain grammatical properties of all languages, to prove that they all shared the same underlying structure.

He had a hard time publishing his theories, because they were so radical, but he finally came out with a book called Syntactic Structures (1957), in which he argued that there is a universal grammar innate to the human brain, which is why children don't have to be taught language. They just pick it up instinctively. At the time, this was a revolutionary idea, because social scientists believed that all human behavior was learned. Chomsky was compared to Copernicus and Darwin for revolutionizing his field of study.

It was a few years later that Chomsky became horrified by the United States' policy in Vietnam. He began encouraging his students at MIT to resist the draft, and he spoke at some of the earliest anti-war rallies in the country. He stopped paying his taxes in protest of the government, and helped organize the protest march on the Pentagon that Norman Mailer wrote about in his book Armies of the Night. Since then, Chomsky has continued to write about linguistics, but he's become much more famous as one of the fiercest critics of American foreign policy.