The Conestoga listed over as the wind hit its side. The gusts tossed the grasses drying alongside the road up into the air, into Ben's hair as he held the reins, as if determined to toss the wagon with hay like some grand garden salad.

You can too say it :-)

It's just a question of determining which methods go with which objects, to use a programming metaphor. Wagons can be loaded or tossed. Hay can be loaded (into) or tossed. Load the wagon with hay is unambigous as hay can be loaded into and wagons can be loaded with. Toss the wagon with hay is also perfectly clear in meaning, as I show above -- it just doesn't mean the same thing as toss hay onto the wagon.

Toss the wagon with hay, as used in the first paragraph, is perfectly clear in meaning? Then I must be an idiot.

"A full wagon seems logical if it has been loaded with something, but the mind—and language—balk at the idea of a wagon changing state so completely because things have been tossed on it."

This definately doesn't seem to be a good example of what she's trying to get at. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem to be quite this complicated. There is an obvious reason why toss doesn't work here. "Toss a Wagon with hay" implies that you're trying to somehow throw the wagon by using hay. Whereas the word Load can only mean one thing.

How about 'fill'?

Jane filled the wagon with hay.

*Jane filled hay into the wagon.

The 'hay-tossing' example above is fun, but I don't think it works without the 'tossed salad' metaphor...

Jane tossed hay into the wagon.

*Jane tossed the wagon with hay.

Forgive me for singing with the choir, but there MUST be some deeper meaning in Pinker's book than what Kenneally suggests.

As many Fraysters accurately point out, "fill" would have worked fine in the example - simply because "fill" has both noun and verb forms that are synonymous, mostly, with "load."

That ain't word-rocket science.

Kenneally goes on to say that Pinker's conclusion is that language is the archive of human perception. Uhm... a duh... What else would it be? Channeling of the divine spirit? Please...

The richness and complexity of language reflects the richness and complexity of ideas belonging to the holder of that language. The fact that some words pull "double duty" depending upon context (implied meaning) doesn't seem to even be an idea worth exploring.

The real notion here is about objective or subjective reality. It's a metaphysical question, not a linguistic one. If Pinker is going to assume the argument of a subjective realist (and leapfrog over a lot of controversy), then fine - welcome to the rewrite of Plato's forms for the umpteenth million time.

I do thank Kenneally for one thing, though. If this really is Pinker's big insight, I think I'll be taking this title off my weekend reading list.