A Random Hump Night Thought
I mean hump night because today is Wednesday which is halfway through the week, thus earning it the name “hump day” because it’s all downhill once you get over the hump. Just in case you were thinking about that thing your dog does to visitors.
At any rate, I just wanted to share a random thought with y’all. Don’t worry, my random thoughts are more interesting than most. If not, I figure they’re still worth reading for the bad jokes I have the gall to write on my Christian blog if nothing else. So, here’s my random thought for tonight:
Did you know that researchers sometimes stumble on these weird connections between the language people speak and some quirk in their thinking which can have disasterous outcomes?
For example, in most languages, a broken bone is something that happens, not something you do. So you would say, “my arm got broken.” But most English speakers say, “I broke my arm.” This would make no sense in most of the world; a sane person wouldn’t deliberately break their own arm! But in America, we regularly speak this way. If you take a minute, you can think of other examples. “In crashed my car”, “I lost my job”, “I let the dog get out”, etc.
Which makes me wonder if this isn’t part of what makes America such a blaming culture. Why we have to sue everyone when something bad happens. Why we reflexively blame people for their own misfortune. Because there’s this quirk built into our language which subconciously teaches us that things don’t just happen; some one always has to be responsible. Even if that someone is you right when your arm got broken in an accident.
Another example is found in countries with high savings rates. Many of us struggle to save or really to plan well for our future at all. But there are a few countries like China and Finland where people sometimes save too much. It turns out that in countries where people are savers, there is no such thing as past, preasent or future tense in their languages. They use the same verb tense and rely on context to convey whether you are talking about past, present or future events.
Economists theorize that in languages where we shift into future tense whenever we speak of the future, it teaches us to think of the future as something which is different than the present. In languages where the present is spoken of no differently than the future, the fact that the future is most likely going to be very much like the present is obvious. It makes the benefit of saving for a better future seem like the obvious thing to do. Thus, this higher savings rate in countrie where the language has this quirk.
And then there are those quirks of language which reveal a truth which we all know, but would never say out loud. Like the German word scheudenfreude which means to take pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. Or my favorite; the Japanese have over a dozen different ways of saying thank you. And it is said that all of them convey varying degrees of resentment between the parties. And isn’t that the truth?
Ahhh . . . .language. Just what you needed to finish your hump day off right, Although perhaps you have a better way of ending it . . . 😉