Gardner begins his definition of linguistic intelligence with examples from prominent poets and their close, highly analytical relationship with words and their meanings. He emphasizes how poets often try dozens of different words before settling on the one with the precise meaning and sound that they need. The complex interaction of vocabulary and semantics, combined with “a sensitivity to shadings of meaning” in the written as well as the spoken word (80), shows linguistic intelligence at work. 

Though not every human being is a poet, all humans grapple with language to some degree. Gardner identifies four elements of linguistic intelligence that humans use widely: its rhetorical aspect, or the ability to use language to convince others of a course of action, its mnemonic aspect, or the use of language to help memorize and retain information, its explanatory aspect, or the use of language to transmit knowledge, and its meta-linguistic aspect, or language’s ability to analyze itself. These complex and fundamental aspects of linguistic intelligence showcase why linguistic aptitude has been “the most thoroughly studied intelligence” in the history of psychology (83). The ability to explicate thought is fundamental to the expression of intelligence, so language is an easily recognizable symbol of intelligence.