If you’ve ever wondered where transformational grammar comes from, you’ve found the source. Published in 1957, Syntactic Structures was Chomsky’s attempt to bring something resembling the theoretical rigor of the physical sciences to the heretofore relatively touchy-feely discipline of linguistics, and the effect was groundbreaking. Chomsky reconceived grammar as a formal, finite set of rules, encoded as deep structures in the human brain, that could in turn generate the infinite range of possible sentences that make up a spoken and written language. The power of Chomsky’s ideas transformed linguistics utterly, and the aftershocks could be felt in the fields of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science and even the then nascent field of computer science. It also introduced to the world Chomsky’s famous example of a sentence that is both grammatically perfect and totally meaningless: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”