Language channels understanding.

TEDTalker Keith Chen

My brother sent me this interesting TED Talk.

This is an old idea in linguistics, and of course anything that impacts my understanding also impacts everything else in my life, since nothing I think or do or say happens outside of what I (think I) know about the world around me.


Keith Chen's TEDTalk: Could Your Language Affect Your Ability To Save Money?

The very real problem with this type of language research is, of course, if the language you speak confines or predisposes your understanding, how do I know if my language isn't interfering with my understanding of you? And vice versa. It's sort of like linguistic quantum mechanics - we can't really examine the meaningful bits of language without impacting meaning.

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Unrelated: We spend most of our lives keeping our deepest disagreements to ourselves, mostly to preserve domestic tranquility, careers, and other relationships that need generous doses of restraint and patience.

But if everyone said what they really thought, we’d probably be surprised how much we agree and wonder why we aren’t changing some things that really need changing. We’d likely end up saying to each other, “But I thought you wanted it this way.”

A short story on that later.

[2014-04-07]

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