Ben Percifield

young people are adept at “code switching,” meaning they use different language depending on who they’re with and the situations they find themselves in.

Meme: a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by internet users.

For example, if there were canisters labeled “gasoline drums,” no worker would ever smoke near them because they were  explicitly  dangerous.

However, when the canisters were labeled “ empty  gasoline drums,”  workers would be less vigilant and would smoke near them.

The word  empty , in their minds, meant “ free of risk .” This perplexed Whorf as

the thing about the bouba/kiki effect is that it shows us that  maybe not all signs are arbitrary , which is pretty fucking cool. A lot of us have a pretty strong impulse to use back vowels (like “ou”) and voiced plosives (like “b”) or nasals (like “m”) to talk about curvy shapes. That is to say, we see a soft round thing and we point at it and go