No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

Foer’s remark underscores the idea that natural languages are not engineered artifacts but evolved systems shaped by countless small, unplanned changes across generations. If a committee tried to design a “communication tool” from scratch, it would likely prioritize regularity, efficiency, and logical transparency. Real languages—English, Mandarin, and thousands of others—are instead full of irregularities, redundancies, ambiguities, and historical accidents. The quote gestures toward a broader point about human culture: complex, highly functional structures can arise without centralized design, through iterative social use and adaptation. It also implicitly challenges the notion that linguistic “messiness” is a flaw; it is evidence of living history and communal evolution.