Open Writing

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that "Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools." He could have been thinking of Benjamin Whorf, the American linguist and chemical engineer who worked twenty years as fire inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company.

Whorf harbored a life-long interest in the science of language, and began studying it at Yale after retiring from Hartford in the 1930s. According to a recent NY Times article by Guy Deutscher, Whorf specialized in Native American languages and became distinguished in the 1940s due to his theory that "Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects and actions."

Whorf's since been proved wrong by many others, including his contemporary and equally famous linguist, Roman Jacobson, who stated "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." In other words, Deutscher points out, "if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think, but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think." English speakers, for example, say they visited a neighbor without divulging that neighbor's sex, but no such ambiguity exists in French and German.

The Indonesian government's taking it all a step further in currying favor with China by emphasizing Chinese Mandarin throughout Indonesia. In 1965 China supported a failed communist take-over in Indonesia that caused extreme ill-will between the countries for decades. Following the 1965 uprising, Indonesia's President Suharto forbade teaching and publishing Chinese. Only four percent of Indonesians are presently of Chinese descent, but they control much of the national economy, and rioting in 1998 over Indonesia's economic imbalances focused on Chinese-Indonesians and left 1,000 of them dead. But a few years ago the government did a one-eighty and today Mandarin speech contests abound and Chinese language study is required at schools throughout Indonesia to better cooperate with China's economic powerhouse.

This change would have been distasteful for Suharto, had he not died in 2008. And now Oxford University researchers think that we might be able to taste sounds, and "hear" shapes and sizes. It's part of the synaesthesia, or "blending of sensory experiences," that humans utilize for things like figuring out who is talking to whom at a crowded party. A BBC report from last month says Oxford professor Charles Spence presented volunteer subjects with two sets of contrasting images, large and small dots or angular and well-rounded shapes, while simultaneously playing low-pitched or high-pitched tones. The subjects responded which came first: tone or image. The results: "The larger dots and more rounded shapes are perceived to 'match' the lower-pitched sounds."

In 1929, an earlier researcher, Wolfgang Kohler, asked test subjects to look at two shapes, orange and angular or purple and rounded, and decide which was named "bouba" and which was "kiki." Bouba and kiki are nonsense words, but people overwhelmingly matched kiki with the sharp, angular shape, and bouba with the softer, rounded one.

Spence is currently trying to demonstrate that auditory and visual sensations can combine with the sense of taste by applying the same sorts of test. He's showing people foods and "asking them questions about them, including is that food more of a 'bouba' or a 'kiki'? Or is it a 'maluma' or 'takete'?" Spence has found that brie cheese is "very maluma," for instance, while cranberries are "very takete." He's working with "world-renowned chef Heston Blumental" to see if food's flavor can be enhanced with suitably suggestive names.

Then there's "paraprosdokian," the awkward term linguists created to describe a figure of speech in which a sentence has an unanticipated ending. For example, "The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it's on the list." Or, "You're never too old to learn something stupid." Your public library's books – online, in print, large print, tape, CDs, MP3s, e-books, and Braille – exist to help you learn something smart. As Groucho Marx noted, "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read."