Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis*

I must begin this post with an apology to my academic friends, in particular to the linguists in that group. I will be doing a popularized take on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis today, which will not be up to the standards of rigor expected in the ivy covered walls. I do this because I have experienced two real world examples of this linguist theory in my day-to-day wanderings over the past couple of months; each time in the unspoken regions of my mind I was thinking - Benjamin Lee Whorf.

First some background. Today the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is generally referred to as Linguistic Relativity. The theory states very simply that the differences in languages leads to differences in both human experience and thought. Meaning that those speaking (and thinking in) very different languages actually perceive the world differently. Or stated another way, language determines your worldview. That may seem intuitively obvious but I guarantee you that is only because you heard this theory first. Until very recently the predominate linguistic view on this issue was that thought precedes language and at the deepest level all humans think alike.

Perhaps an illustration is in order. Take the statement: John broke the window. Now in english there is an agent of the breakage, that would be John. But in some linguistic cultures agents are not part of the language. Ask a member of that culture about the sentence and they are likely to report something like: the window broke. Who did it is not relevant. Wait you say, so in those cultures John is not responsible? Who's going to pay to fix the window? Well it can be a lot more subtle than that.

Try this one - The orange and blue polar bear. You see him up there at the top, right? You know he is not really orange and blue, it's the light. But what if I told you that bears like that feed at low light; in the fall and spring there are long periods of low sun creating a lot of orange light and bluish shadows. So the statement - orange and blue bear refers not only to the colors but to the observable fact that at those times of day or night the bear might well be hunting for food and therefore more dangerous to cross paths with.

A white bear is a nuisance, a orange-blue bear can kill you. Same bear, different outcome. Good to know the local language and the worldview it conveys.

Yes, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity is a lot more complex than what I have explained. Believe me I know; I had a good friend who was all but obsessed with Whorf for many years and we all heard endless permutations and applications of Whorfian thought.

Now to the incident that prompted this rumination on Mr. Sapir and Mr. Whorf. I was in the Golden Bough bookstore in Mt. Shasta doing some lazy browsing. The staff person and a customer, who was obviously a friend were having a discussion about angels. It was clear to me that they were not going to resolve their differences because despite the fact that they were indeed both speaking english, they did not share a common worldview. I also noticed that their differing takes on reality were completely influenced by how they derived meaning from their own words. As I said they did not share a language in the sense that they assigned the same meaning to the words they were using.

At one point, perhaps 15 minutes into the debate, the staffer was shelving some books which brought him into my aisle and he said:

"What do you think, are there angels or not?"

I gave my dura mater a yawning flex and replied:

"Well I am currently working on a novel in which one of the main characters is an angel."

"So you believe angels are real," said the customer.

"Another one," grumbled the staffer.

"Actually I don't think angels are real, but neither do you," I said, directing my answer at the customer.

"Certainly I do," she protested.

"Well then why do you say believe in angels? Why is it a matter of faith and not fact?"

I never did get to tell them that the reason they would never agree was because they were not speaking the same language and did not share a worldview. It sounded like they were having a discussion but their beliefs did not encompass the possibility of the other person being right.

By the way, just in case the other two people from the other discussion that got me thinking about Sapir and Whorf, just in case they are reading this. There was a correct answer to the question you were debating. It was southwest. And I know one of you thinks they said that, so you should have won the argument. But when you stand on a hilltop and point due north and say "southwest" you can't be completely right; either your finger or your voice is mistaken. But then the entire discussion was about the meaning of direction and you two will never agreed on that. So much linguistic relativity.

Did you get lost just a bit in that last paragraph? Was it the obtuse nature of my writing or was it linguistic relativity?

Rainy Sunday Street Scene

Still trying to get my meds balanced, the consequences of applying the pain patch too close to ingesting a muscle relaxant is apparently a nap. Yesterday, a grey saturday, I nodded off in the early evening only to wake up in what I thought was the middle of the night. There was to be no going directly back to sleep, so I snapped on the reading lamp and dove back into The Historian. Sometime later I heard the too loud talking from eight floors below, a gaggle of Cal students headed back to campus from a night of partying. A weekend annoyance that must really bother lite sleepers. 

But wait . . . the parties break up between midnight and two, it must not be the middle of the night after all. I started to check the time and then let it go, who cares -- I have a book and a quilt, what matters the parsing of the night. 

Some time later I nodded off. When I awoke again it had turned light, well grey actually and moist. Sunday was going to be rainy and dim -- some of my favorite weather. I lay in bed looking out on the the seamless sky, my mind drifted to a scene I had written yesterday where I mentioned a character's stance on breakfast. I wrote that he was "not a big bacon and eggs man." Neither am I but that sure sounded good on this particular morning. So I rolled out, donned some sweats and with a peremptory face splash and tooth scrape I was off to the market. The dashboard suggested it was 7:45 and 52 degrees, no mention of the rain, I clearly need a more technologically advanced mode of transportation, one that can tell me when its raining.

I ducked under the store awning and grabbed a outlier cart. There was a street guy neatly arranging all the other shopping carts and telling the universe -- "It ain't no right weather for a dog, no dignity in being rained upon." I pondered that bit of wisdom in the produce aisle and decided it was well worth a dollar when I left the store. Street wisdom is a commodity that should be rewarded.

Not a lot of shoppers early on a rainy Sunday, I grabbed only the basics: eggs, bacon, bread and chocolate. One check stand open, the only other customer handing her check and ID to the checker. There was a three or four minute technical issue with getting the computer to accept her check for $12.01, which included two dollars cash back. While the clerk struggled with the scanner, the customer told us how much of an accomplishment she consider it to actually get herself out of the house on "such an awful day." She was quite fashionably dressed in 1950's school marm, with black horn-rimmed glasses and the mandatory hair bun; not to mention that rain equated with awful and she wrote a check for two dollars cash back. Oh she was going to make it into a story for sure, a living breathing archetype.

The manager floated by, punched a few buttons solving the check issue and the flow of commerce began anew. A change of clerks slowed my checkout by a minute or so, when I was again outside under the awning, headed for my chariot, I saw her and the street guy by her car. He was too close, she had her hands drawn up under her chin, arms tight to her chest. Shit! Sometimes being the large, white male who does the right thing is just a pain in the ass.

I set my bag on the hood of my car and walked towards them.

"I think you're frightening her."

"We just talkin'."

"I don't think she wants to talk in the rain."

"Dis is none of your business."

"How about five bucks to leave her alone?" I snapped the bill in my hand.

"I ain't no fuckin' beggar!" He turned aggressively toward me, then immediately lowered his voice, cowering his head. He had instantaneously converted to ultra-submissive. Before I could sort it out, she pointed over my shoulder and said: "Police."

I glanced back and two Berkeley uniforms were headed our way.

"Is there a problem?"

I turned back to my groceries, "She can fill you in," I said.

"Sir, we need citizen complaints to take any action against violent offenders."

"He wasn't violent towards me, but as I said, you might want to speak with her."

I wasn't about to parse the interaction between those two psychological complexes. I mean two dollars cash back, really? Besides there were bacon and eggs waiting not to mention a grey, rainy day to enjoy.

----

photo from a Sam's Club in China

Around the Firepit

Remember those late night debates in the dormitory. Do you miss them? I don't. Well I don't miss being 19 and talking and acting like I knew more than I did. But I do miss the conversation, the camaraderie and yes, the mind expansion that flow from interactions like those. I enjoy the feelings that honest, open, intense conversation engenders.

I was reminded of this a few weekends ago, when some of my olde grad school friends and I got together, had a big meat laden barbeque and then late into the night, we tossed yet one more log on the coals and launched into one more topic. Sometimes I miss heated conversations where polysyllabic utterances are not discouraged and where loud and pointed disagreement is often met with laughter and even agreement.

Read all you will, ponder until the dragons come home but articulating what you are formulating to an interested and attentive cadre is oh so satisfying. Even when they beat up your still half-formed thesis.

Gotta do that again soon.

There But For The Grace of Homer Go I . . .

I played a small poker tournament yesterday but this is not a poker story. This is a pondering morality tale with a poker backdrop.

It was a small tournament only two tables, Bill and I played. The young lady on my right was an OK player, her husband at the other end of the table was not. She wore too much perfume and over the course of the hour or two it took for her to bust out, I liked her less and less as her mood darkened and she complained about things irrelevant to the poker game. Some might call it: "just bitching". She went out 11th, so she bubbled the final table. Only the top two places were scheduled to be paid but when we got to four players (both Bill and I still in) the short stack player began to ask about a chop. The chipleader was not interested, so for about thirty minutes the stacks went up and down as the blinds went higher and higher. It became a shove-fest. I bubbled in 4th and the remaining three players chopped the cash.

But this is not a poker story. Last evening, I was down in the casino at Monte Carlo as I exited onto the Strip I saw several LVPD officers talking with the young lady and her husband who had played in the tournament. Out of curiosity I listened in.

It appears that after she busted out, she took her dark mood to another casino and playing what I believe was carribbean stud and won herself $40,000. She then decided to continue drinking heavily and to switch to playing craps, which apparently she did not understand well. While she was drinking, throwing dice, showing her tits and generally having a great time (did I mention she had ditched her husband?). Anyways at some point she had $5K of her $40K windfall on the craps table and the other $35,000 stuck in her purse in cash from where it was lifted by a crafty pick pocket. Hence, the police.

It took about five minutes of eavesdropping to get the gory details of her sad story, I believe I overheard rendition six or seven. All the while the husband kept chiming in with: "I don't know, she dumped me after she drank dinner. She still had all the money then."

So yesterday I bubbled a little poker tournament, all in all not a bad day . . . considering.

[my apologies for the poker jargon to my newer non-poker playing readership]

Conundrums

co-nun-drum [kuh-nuhn-druh m]

-noun

1. a riddle, the answer to which involves a pun or play on words.

2. anything that puzzles.

I prefer the second definition myself and offer a few recent examples.

Caymus Vineyards in the Napa Valley produces a blended white vintage each year call Conundrum. Back in '96 or '97 it was a brilliant wine. But it changes year to year. I have tried it several times since and never found the sterling richness of that first taste. Much like love and artichokes; nothing ever lives up to your first unblemished memory.

Next, a dilemma in the conundrum sense. You are visiting a friend, who has a new girlfriend, but it is a long-distance relationship. They speak by phone every night by appointment. Now on one particular night, after a long day of household chores, my friend falls asleep around ten. He is curled up on his bed with two cats and a sci-fi book and as peaceful as a well nursed tiger cub.

Question: Do you wake him to make his nightly call to the new woman?

My answer is no. Sleep is nature's way of telling you that you need to, well, sleep. On the other hand, that would be his hand, there is the new babe who might misinterpret his lack of phoneage to be.. what? cheating? change of heart? coronary? This is actually only a conundrum if my friend is a whack job or OCD.

p.s. the girlfriend agreed with my decision, she is my new best friend, he remains an love-sick idiot.

Part Three: My favorite niece. OK, not really my favorite. My niece, OK actually my cousin's sister's kid, but it plays better if I actually know the her; so... My favorite niece, is back with her boyfriend. He got another girl prego, she had the kid, he is not supporting in any way (Yep, she kept it) but he has promised not to do that again.

Now is the correct way to introduce some gentle advice:

A. Jasmine, your mom asked me to speak with you about your present situation...

or

B. What?! Are you f***ing nuts!!!

Questions and comments can be mailed to:

Dr. Laura

c/o Talk Out of The Righteous Side of Your Mouth Radio