Sublime

“Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of

If we hold language up as a mirror to the mind, what do we see reflected there: human nature or the cultural conventions of our society? This is the central question of the first part of the book.

Testimony from polyglots like her has invited a more sophisticated take on Whorf’s ideas. What if language is less like a yoke than like a wind, nudging us in various directions? This moderate approach, which is more in line with Whorf’s original perspective, is known as “weak Whorfianism” or, paradoxically, neo-Whorfianism.

Language was an overlay, so loud that it usually shouted out all the other thoughts in the human mind. Whenever I think about thinking, my thoughts become words. It is the language talking at me. But the language came from outside. I think I control it, but it controls me back. Like the Hive Queen in the minds of the drones, language becomes part

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

“Now, there was a time when we believed that what a human mind could accomplish was determined by genetic factors. Piffle, of course, but it looked convincing for many years, because distinctions between tribes were so evident. Now we understand that it's all cultural. That, after all, is what a culture is—a group of people who share in common

“So our personalities and humanity aren’t recorded in language, they’re created through language.” “Both correct, Dr. Beeko. Recorded and created.”

We can only experience the world with our receptors and the degree of linguistic precision that our culture affords us.

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.