#the exploding babies one still annoys me MA'AM YOU ARE A LINGUIST WHY DID YOU WRITE THE BABIES EXPLODING

[morhath]

hey I saw your tags on that one simpsons linguistics post and like legit curious... what's linguistic relativity? (this is assuming you'd wanna talk about it; if not feel free to tell me to google it 👍)

as much as I love a good rant sadly I have a migraine on top of COVID so I am not up for one right now, so yeah, I recommend looking it up to get The Full Info, the wikipedia page is pretty good

it's also known as the sapir-whorf hypothesis but that's inaccurate

there's a strong version ("language super controls how you think") and a weak version ("language influences how you think a little bit") and as you may be able to guess the strong version is almost definitely wrong while there's decent evidence for the weak version

the basic points of my Entire Rant are:

honestly I'm still a lil suspicious of the weaker version at times/at least suspicious of how it's interpreted

I would like to confiscate the strong version from sff authors for at least twenty years. no more linguistic relativity for you. you can't use it anymore. I'm so tired. Ted Chiang you get an exception because Story of Your Life (short story that was the basis for the movie "Arrival") is very good even if it is scientifically inaccurate. but I think it's overdone, frankly often stupid, and playing into public perception of this kind of stuff which is a problem because...

so much racism all the time (this is a huge part of the previous two points) (I cannot overstate how much racism I encounter with this stuff) (primarily in non-linguistics spaces but still) (I've even fallen for it when I was younger and just interested in linguistics but hadn't studied it yet) (it's so pervasive and so many people believe this shit) (obvi you can't just Take This Theory Away b/c people are being racist about it but I really don't love how people generally talk about/use it)

giant disclaimer tho that this is not really My Area of linguistics so I am BASICALLY a layperson here

also the full rant involves exploding babies and [other main interesting bit redacted because it occurs to me there's a possibility for some sort of paper or talk there actually and I keep SAYING I want to return to the cold and unloving arms of academia]