This morning's obsession: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

[tcepsa]

I think that this comic provides a fun introduction (after all, who doesn't love giant rampaging dinosaur discourse? Except maybe Randall Munroe, author of xkcd and professed raptorphobe ;)

My current two cents: My own personal experience leads me to suspect that it is true, and it's why you occasionally see random encodings (words describing a concept) popping up here; I'm trying to become more aware of ideas that I've never even considered--or at least not considered seriously--because I didn't have words for them. My worldview has been shifting a lot lately, and while I wouldn't say my actual vocabulary has expanded, I would say that my encodings have. In other words, I now have more concepts put in words (sometimes a lot of words in an ungainly conglomeration) that I never really even thought about before--in some cases, never realized they existed. Mainly, I suspect, because my existing worldview (collection of memes?) hadn't really allowed for them, and I didn't know words for them.

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the SWH and the hermeneutic circle

[lolabrandywine.livejournal.com]

I wrote a short paper (well, not really a paper; a reflection, if you will) about the SWH and the hermeneutic circle that Sara Melzer describes in an analysis she wrote about Pascal (the man, not the language). Ask me about it if you want to know more.