Sublime

Benjamin Lee Whorf, who seduced a whole generation into believing, without a shred of evidence, that American Indian languages lead their speakers to an entirely different conception of reality from ours.

Benjamin Lee Whorf, to whom we shall return in a later chapter, captivated a whole generation when he taught that our habit of separating the world into objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”) is not a true reflection of reality but merely a division thrust upon us by the grammar of European languages.

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

Our observations about how a language can reflect the conceptual system of its speakers derive in great part from the work of Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and others who have worked in that tradition.

Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. It’s supposed to be a hypothesis about how language shapes or determines thought, but it isn’t really a hypothesis at all. It’s a vaguely defined cluster of very different claims.

not all languages have the same color terms.  If you give speakers of different languages a color spectrum and ask them to label when one color becomes another,  they will give different answers