What are words worth? Well they are worth thinking about, and Noam Chomsky has spent a lifetime doing just that. He holds firm to his theory of hard-wired grammar—and he doesn’t buy the story that language emerged because we had to talk to each other to get things done; it's not where words came from. For an adequate explanation we need to look inward rather than outward; a task that might exceed our physical limits. Is understanding the kind of creatures we are even possible?