Sapir and Whorf’s rhetoric answered to a contemporary moral panic about the use and abuse of language. The young 20th century saw public discourse perverted by new forms of propaganda, disseminated by such new technologies as radio and film, all of which accompanied and facilitated the catastrophic upheavals of the First World War and the political

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As languages are passed on from generation to generation, the differences between them accumulate, making the languages and the worldviews they contain more and more distinct.