I’m not very good at recognising celebrities. Not that I come across many, of course, but even if I did, I’m not sure I’d recognise them. I once saw the Archbishop of Canterbury waiting for a train. He was easy to recognise but I don’t think he counts as a celebrity. Not a Hollywood A-lister. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of those. I once thought I saw John Travolta at two in the morning in Bangkok airport, looking rather dishevelled and depressed, but as no one else was giving him a second glance, I may have been mistaken.
But I recognised Steven Pinker.
Now, I sometimes bemoan the struggle a writer faces to find readers. But my books sell like hot cakes compared to The L2 Mental Lexicon. That was the title of my PhD thesis – not the sort of book that flies off the shelves. In fact it was never published, but that doesn’t matter because the five people who read it – four members on the panel of examiners and my supervisor – all approved. And so it was that my research laboratory forked out the cost of an air fare to Los Angeles, where I presented my findings at the Psychonomics conference in the Bonaventura hotel.
It wasn’t a talk, but a poster. I stood in a huge room in front of my display along with two hundred others, rather like vendors at a fish market waiting for passers-by to show some interest. I contemplated shouting ‘Ripe synonyms, fresh collocations! Step this way!’, but refrained in favour of eyeing each visitor hopefully, willing them to take an interest in my discoveries. A few people did, their eyes glazing over as I explained.
I was in the middle of one of these explanations when I saw a man studying the poster and my heart missed a beat – there he was! The celebrated linguist, author of The Language Instinct, was going to congratulate me on my ground-breaking research. I held my breath. His eyes moved rapidly over the poster. Then he glanced at me with a somewhat amused expression, nodded hello, and moved on. At the end of the session, I removed the poster and went up to my room, where I put it in my suitcase, feeling the glow of Pinker’s gaze upon it.
So Pinker and I parted, never to meet again. But we have one thing in common. Our interests have broadened beyond linguistics and we now write books about death. Well, in his case only one, as far as I know – The Better Angels of Our Nature published in 2011 – but in that one book he packs more deaths than in all the murder mysteries ever written. If you don’t fancy reading its 832 pages, there’s a brief summary here. In fact I’ll summarise the summary for you: the risk of dying a violent death has decreased gradually throughout history, resulting today in the most peaceful age ever. Which is very good news indeed.
Not that detectives - or writers of murder mysteries for that matter - are likely to go out of work any time soon: there were 787 homicides recorded in the UK last year.