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Comment by davesque | Hacker News Reader

Only slightly related, it recently occurred to me while journaling that the dictates of English grammar do a fair bit of work in forming opinions. You might think you believe one thing, but when you set about describing it, the linguistic choices have a subtle influence over the content of your statements. Over the entirety of an exposition, that influence can amount to a significant shift in meaning. I guess that's the point of journaling in a way; to find out what you think. But the effect must show up everywhere without people realizing it, even in writing that's not experimental.

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Referencing the Bouba/Kiki effect[1] "a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects", is it strange how some people or place names seem cool, exotic, foreign, and others seem dorky, boring, local or weird? Why should that be a thing?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

To avoid this, I don't let my mind form words too early. Words can come to mind so effortlessly that I wonder if I'm saying what I really feel.

I refrain from describing what I want to say before I have a chance to search my brain for related concepts to convey or contrast my thoughts. Then I can decide if the thing I'm about to say matches how I feel about the subject.

If you feel like your language is determining your thoughts, then I recommend (aside from possibly bilingualism) just taking more time to choose your words. Supposedly, the "decision-making centers" in the brain tend to activate prior to the parts responsible for understanding and reasoning ... apparently implying that humans usually rationalize decisions we've already made rather than reasoning beforehand.

Then again, I'll digress because I also do that to compensate for my poor communication and multitasking skills, so others may not share my thinking style and limitations.

Also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Nice. That theory seems quite a bit larger in scope. And intuitively it makes sense. What I had in mind was a more localized version of this which is sort of like a game of telephone within a language. It's not surprising that one's native language would affect the way one looks at things. But what seems more surprising is that choosing to express an idea one way vs. another within the same language can even end up communicating rather different sounding things. And the subconscious influence of the wording doesn't just have an effect on the reader but also on the author as well. Seems kinda like what is talked about in the Wikipedia article on Sapir-Whorf but also kinda different.

I think the effect takes a lot of different forms. It can happen as a result of connotations or homonyms of certain words. Or it can come down to artistic considerations. For example, one might prefer to express an idea in slightly different language that is less effective but more poetic sounding. Or maybe the author thinks it would be thrilling to make a very grand sounding statement when they had originally set out to touch on something more specific. And so the language ends up forming the idea just as much as it's meant to communicate it.

I think this is clearly evident in political debates where people talk themselves into a frenzy.

I agree, which is why I feel it's worthwhile to expand one's vocabulary, and expose yourself to a variety of communication styles. It's so subtle, it's hard to tell how much your choice of words influences your thinking, or how you process the world around you. More tools in the language toolbox can literally be mind-expanding.

And here I thought Worf from Star Trek had authored it :-)

While I can't say how much effect grammar has on thought processes, the metaphors we rely on can be significant. For an example that came up earlier today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29923866), the term "sanitizing" is often used to mean escaping data. But this way of thinking appears to create a strong urge to "sanitize" as soon as possible, so that the rest of the system will only have to handle "clean" data. This leads to mistakes: data is escaped on input, and therefore tends to be wrong for all but one of several output formats (possibly resulting in security vulnerabilities). And then because data from trusted sources is implied to be "clean", it isn't escaped at all, even when it will wind up being parsed incorrectly. Discarding this metaphor could actually result in better software.

In case you're interested: This phenomenon you thought of is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or perhaps a variant of it)

Perhaps this is why many people become more open-minded after learning a second language.

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