Poorly Understood Linguistics is Magic

The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis goes like this: humans think in words, therefore the words that you think in constrain your thoughts. If you don't have a word for a concept, you can't think about that concept. If you learn new words, you gain the ability to think about that concept.

It's not clear that humans must think in words.

And it is definitely the case that humans can come up with new words by themselves, and then teach them to others. Words don't spring from the void. (Although that's how Genesis says the world was created.)

But people really like the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis because it takes a universal experience -- learning new words, a thing that happens to every single one of us -- and extends it into magic: if only you knew the right language, you could think thoughts that you can't think now, and maybe some of those thought-words can do things that you can't do yet. Some people clearly have verbal skills that allow them to influence other people to do their bidding -- is that because they know the right words? Maybe the whole universe can be coerced if you only knew how to speak to it properly.

Books Read

24. The Killer Collective - Barry Eisler.   In which he takes all his previous viewpoint antiheroes and introduces them to each other so that they can work for great justice. I am now surprised that nobody has made a movie from his books yet -- they all take the form of obsessively choreographed fight scenes interspersed with clue gathering and occasional romantic entanglement.