Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

Your language will then simply reflect the fact that you think in the egocentric system anyway. On the other hand, if you are a nomad in the Australian bush, there are no roads or second left turnings after the traffic lights to guide you, so egocentric directions will be far less useful and you will naturally come to think in geographic coordinates. The way you then end up speaking about space will just be a symptom of the way you think anyway

Kipling’s elephant got his long trunk because the crocodile pulled his nose until it stretched and stretched, and Ted Hughes’s lovelorn hare got his long, long

But for the general public, Gladstone’s virtuoso Homerology was a subject of fascination and admiration

Its three stout, door-stopping tomes of well over seventeen hundred pages sweep

difficult to swing from one extreme position and settle directly in the middle, without first hurtling all the way to the opposite extreme.

And experiments with humans have shown that exposure to red induces physiological effects such as increasing the electrical resistance of the skin, which is a measure of emotional arousal.

The only thing that culture was free to chose, they said, was how many of these foci receive separate names (and what labels to give them, of course). Once a culture has decided on a number, nature takes care of all the rest: it dictates which foci will receive names, it dictates in which order, and it draws the rough boundaries around these foci according to a predetermined design.

Their notion of “focus” was based on an intuition that we all share, namely that some shades are better or “more typical” examples of a given color than others. There may be millions of different shades of red, for instance, but we still feel that some of these are redder than others.

black and white >​​​ red >​​​ yellow >​​​ green >​​​ blue >​​​ black and white >​​​ red >​​​ green >​​​ yellow >​​​ blue

The theory of arbitrariness may have had no legs to stand on, nor bottom, nor back. But as with the chair in the ditty, the theory just sat, ignoring little things like that.