Claude Hagège is a classically trained fieldwork linguist who conducts research in the Cameroons, British Columbia, Micronesia and wherever languages exist that have not yet been studied. (…)

Theoretician and polyglot as well, in addition to speaking several oral-tradition languages, Claude Hagège has perfect command of the main international languages and is known to lecture in a number of Germanic and Semitic languages, Chinese, several Slavic and Romance languages. Both as a researcher and a university professor, he has always made it a rule not to accept any simplifying model: his critical essays on generative grammar explain his refusal of abstract universalism (logicism), the primacy of a single dimension in language (syntax) or any idealized model of linguistic competence minimizing the importance of variations. On this point, he says [in L’Homme de paroles]:

The obsession with being scientific has led it [linguistics] to clothe itself in a false and artificial rigour for which there is no model, even in the most rigourous of sciences. The fascination with formalism has confined it within the narrow space of a technical discourse whose object, however difficult that may be to imagine, is the man of words. For not only has this space been emptied of a historical and a social dimension, but therein, the human element is a definitive abstraction, and words say nothing.

This very innovative criticism, formulated by Claude Hagège in respect to formal grammars and chomskyism - the theories of Chomsky and his disciples, whose generative models date back to the 60s - is one of the contributions that gave a new start to research in typology, linguistic comparison and cognitive gramar, fields currently recognized and reemerging throughout the world. Thus, without too much theoretical pretension, it can certainly be said that this cautious and reserved approach has played a catalyzing, if not pioneering role.

{ CNRS | Continue reading }

I. RESEARCH

My research is founded on extensive fieldwork, carried out in all parts of the world, supplemented by vast bibliographical explorations and constant correspondence with scientists of all nationalities. My work spans four essential areas: general linguistics, typology, sociolinguistics and specific linguistic domains. In general linguistics I examine linguistic theory, including phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, translation theory, the origins of language and languages, and the history of linguistics. In typology, I focus on language types, language universals and grammaticalization. In sociolinguistics, I delve into language planning and reform, 
the status and function of languages, field work, along with creolistics, mixed languages, Jewish languages, and language death. The specific linguistic domains I am interested in are French, Indo European, Uralic, Semitic, African, Amerindian, Sino Tibetan and Austronesian languages. More marginally, I explore the areas of semiology and literary semiotics, as well as philosophy of language. The results of these studies appear regularly, either in published form (books, articles, reviews) and/or as presentations.

II. TEACHING

General linguistics is the study of both language as defining capability of the human species, and languages as the historical and social manifestations of this capability. My Chair in Linguistic Theory at the Collège de France, which I have held since 1989, illustrates this polarity. In effect, at one end one finds language, studied from the perspective of child acquisition, as based upon innate capabilities supplemented by contributions from the social environment, at the other end one finds languages, studied in their diversity. This diversity is highlighted through typological studies, which seek to establish language types in the areas of phonology, morpho syntax and semantics. Typological categories may or may not coincide with genetic relationships, namely the grouping of the diverse human languages into one or another of the large families: Indo-European, Semitic, Uralic, Altaic, Bantu, Caucasian, Amerindian, Sino Tibetan, Austronesian, etc. The symbolic content of languages depends on their powers of identification, in other words the image they give of the diverse nations. The attachment of the latter to their languages is often very powerful and may be a source of conflict.

Over the last four years, my courses at the Collège de France have focused on the following four themes. In 1999-2000, I attempted to define what a realistic vision of language phenomena could be, through the study of the role played by the context in the definition of categories, and through the revision of the opposition between associative and syntagmatic relations. In 2000-2001, I examined six different aspects of how inter-individual and social relations are reflected in linguistic utterances: the illusion of syntactic autonomy , morphosyntax as dependant on semantic phenomena, morphosyntax as dependant on pragmatic phenomena, the dialogal relation as sole domain where certain morphemes are used; the extinction of languages; and lastly, dyshyponoesis, the outline of a hypothesis concerning the neurological bases of pragmatic commands in language phenomena. 2001-2002 was devoted to the introduction of a linguistic study of affects: after having defined the object of my study, I presented the expression of affects in daily conversation; I then questioned whether languages have structures exclusively assigned to the expression of affective utterances. In continuation of this study, 2002-2003 was devoted to a typological essay on affects: after defining the field, I, in turn, studied the cases of affect specific markings and the lack thereof.

Furthermore, I have been teaching at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) since 1977, where I serve as Study Director in Structural Linguistics. My syllabus over the past four years has mainly focused on phenomena in the fields of syntax, semantics and enunciation theory.

III. SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Beyond the previously mentioned work carried out in the field, my scientific activities and responsibilities take the form, of multiple conferences and teaching sessions as visiting Professor, in France and abroad, as well as serving on several editorial boards. My activities also include presiding various professional societies and scientific committees, such as the Société de Linguistique de Paris.


I have also participated, as director, panel member or approval committee member, in a large number of doctoral theses bearing on languages spoken all over the world, and on a great variety of theoretical issues in modern linguistics.

{ Claude Hagège | Collège de France | L’Homme de paroles : contribution linguistique aux sciences humaines is the Claude Hagège book to read first, unfortunately/apparently not translated in english. }

A foreign language can sound so unintelligible that it’s hard to believe what linguists have been saying for years: Languages from around the world all follow the same rules. No language will ever require placing a particular word at a fixed point in a sentence (e.g., “da” must always be in the fifth position). No language forms questions by simply reversing the words in a statement. The reasons for this lie in the brain’s wiring, which dictates the possible patterns languages can follow. Anything that breaks the mold will be impossible to learn or pass down to a new generation.

Similarly, biologists say there are limits to what forms of life can possibly exist, because all new species must evolve from existing genetic material and because the external environment places constraints on which variations survive.

If evolution limits what creatures can look like and neurobiology dictates how languages work, perhaps our genes constrain the range of possible human cultures. “Some cultural forms will never be considered. … These can be thought of as impossible cultures,” writes Marc D. Hauser, a professor of psychology and human evolutionary biology at Harvard.

{ The Wilson Quarterly | Continue reading }

artwork { Ana Bagayan }

The fact is, then, that a large proportion of these “most beautiful English words” that aesthetes like to cite owe their claim to beauty entirely on a fancied resemblance to the words of other languages, rather than any inherent “English” phonaesthetic virtues. To show how great a role meaning plays in these judgments, Max Beerbohm once wrote “If gondola were a disease, and if a scrofula were a beautiful boat peculiar to a beautiful city, the effect of each word would be exactly the reverse of what it is. The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes.”

{ The romantic side of familiar words | Language Log | Continue reading }

Sometimes you hear a word for the first time and think: “Of course.” How better to describe Paris Hilton than as a “celebutante” or the frequent tabloid target Alec Baldwin as “the bloviator”? (Thanks, New York Post!)

Now make room for “prehab.”

Prehab made its debut on Feb. 23, the handiwork of GlasgowRose, a commenter on Gawker, after a publicist for Charlie Sheen announced that the star of “Two and a Half Men” was entering rehab as a “preventative measure.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

A respected scientist set out to determine which drugs are actually the most dangerous — and discovered that the answers are, well, awkward. (…)

The list, printed as a chart with the unassuming title “Mean Harm Scores for 20 Substances,” ranked a set of common drugs, both legal and illegal, in order of their harmfulness - how addictive they were, how physically damaging, and how much they threatened society. Many drug specialists now consider it one of the most objective sources available on the actual harmfulness of different substances.

That ranking showed, with numbers, what Nutt was fired for saying out loud: Overall, alcohol is far worse than many illegal drugs. So is tobacco. Smoking pot is less harmful than drinking, and LSD is less damaging yet.

{ The Boston Globe | Continue reading }

Andy was one of my best friends. We hung out together several nights a week for over ten years. We used to go to Studio 54 — an amazing place.

{ Jerry Hall interview | Index magazine | Continue reading }

photo { Andy Warhol and Jerry Hall, Studio 54, NYC, late 70s }

Scientists have proposed that the way food smells could possibly be related to the sounds we hear when we consume them.

They note that there could be a connection between smell and sound, a hybrid sense they call “smound.”

{ Discover | Continue reading }

artwork { Yves Klein, F 88, 1961 }

What is nostalgia good for? A Standard Life study suggests 28 to 40-year-olds don’t plan for the future because they prefer to reminisce about past times. (…)

In recent years, psychologists have been trying to analyse the powerful and enduring appeal of our own past - what Mr Routledge calls the “psychological underpinnings of nostalgia”.

“Why does it matter? Why would a 40-year-old man care about a car he drove when he was 18?” he asks. It matters, quite simply, because nostalgia makes us feel good.

Once nostalgia was considered a sickness - the word derives from the Greek “nostos” (return) and “algos” (pain), suggesting suffering due to a desire to return to a place of origin. (…)

“Nostalgia is a way for us to tap into the past experiences that we have that are quite meaningful - to remind us that our lives are worthwhile, that we are people of value, that we have good relationships, that we are happy and that life has some sense of purpose or meaning.” (…)

Nostalgia is usually involuntary and triggered by negative feelings - most commonly loneliness - against which it acts as a sort of natural anti-depressant by countering those feelings.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

In 1966, William Labov, the father of sociolinguistics, discovered that many people with New York accents — the stock Noo Yawk kind — didn’t like the way they talked. It was kind of sad. Labov found widespread “linguistic self-hatred,” he reported. People from New York and New Jersey described their own speech as “distorted,” “sloppy” and “horrible.” No wonder those great old accents came to be regarded as a class giveaway, to be thrown over in the name of assimilation, refinement and the acquisition of Newscaster English.

But that was the ’60s, back before the never-ending you-tawkin-t’me aria was enshrined in movies like “Mean Streets,” “Saturday Night Fever,” “Working Girl” and, of course, “Taxi Driver.” Before long, people were consciously cultivating the once-despised dialect. Now an extra-hammy version of the accent — which thrives in the New York City area, including northern New Jersey — is a point of fighting pride, most recently among the brawling bozos on MTV’s captivating and incendiary reality show “Jersey Shore.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Johnny Boy: Y’know Joey Clams…
Charlie: Yeah.
Johnny Boy: …Joey Scallops, yeah.
Charlie: I know him too, yeah.
Johnny Boy: …yeah. No. No, Joey Scallops is Joey Clams.
Charlie: Right.
Johnny Boy: Right.
Charlie: …they’re the same person!
Johnny Boy: Yeah!
Charlie: ‘ey!
Johnny Boy: ‘ey…

{ Mean Streets, 1973 }

artwork { Mo Maurice Tan }

Here’s a curious paradox related to American Sign Language, the system of hand-based gestures used by around 2 million deaf people in the US and elsewhere to communicate.

Almost 40 years ago, researchers discovered that although it takes longer to make signs than to say the equivalent words, on average sentences can be completed in about the same time. How can that be possible?

Today, Andrew Chong and buddies at Princeton University in New Jersey give us the answer. They say that the information content of the 45 handshapes that make up sign language is higher than the information content of phonemes, the building blocks of the spoken word. In other words, there is greater redundancy in spoken English than signed English.

In a way, that’s a trivial explanation, a mere restatement of the problem. What’s impressive about the Princeton contribution is the way they have arrived at this conclusion.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

I would estimate that I spend a good two hours per day reading, writing and commenting on internet content, with absolutely no tangible, material benefit to my life at all.

{ 2Blowhards | Continue reading }

…Beryl Schlossman’s suggestion that in Joyce’s works language is the “hero” and is “at once center and decentering.”

{ Male and Female Creativity in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake | PDF }

It is language which speaks, not the author.

{ Stéphane Mallarmé quoted by Roland Barthes }

{ Tobacco Smoke Enema (1750s-1810s) | via Barry Ritholz | Read more: Wikipedia }

The Voynich Manuscript has been dubbed “The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World.” It is named after its discoverer, the American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who discovered it in 1912, amongst a collection of ancient manuscripts kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome.

No one knows the origins of the manuscript. Experts believe it was written in between the 15th and 17th centuries. The manuscript is small, seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly 235 pages.

Its pages are filled with hand-written text and crudely drawn illustrations. The illustrations depict plants, astrological diagrams, and naked women. The women could represent creation and rebirth of consciousness.

These illustrations are strange, but much stranger is the text itself, because the manuscript is written entirely in a mysterious, unknown alphabet that has defied all attempts at translation.

It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. The text has no apparent corrections. There is evidence for two different “languages” (investigated by Currier and D’Imperio) and more than one scribe, probably indicating an ambiguous coding scheme.

Apparently, Voynich wanted to have the mysterious manuscript deciphered and provided photographic copies to a number of experts. However, despite the efforts of many well known cryptologists and scholars, the book remains unread. There are some claims of decipherment, but to date, none of these can be substantiated with a complete translation. (…)

The Voynich Manuscript first appears in 1586 at the court of Rudolph II of Bohemia, who was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period. Rudolph collected dwarfs and had a regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers, and he was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented, Protestant noblemen of this period and epitomized the liberated northern European prince. He was a patron of alchemy and supported the printing of alchemical literature. (…)

Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decipher a single word). This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax - a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols. (…)

By current estimates, the book originally had 272 pages in 17 quires of 16 pages each. Only about 240 vellum pages remain today, and gaps in the page numbering (which seems to be later than the text) indicate that several pages were already missing by the time that Voynich acquired it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date.

The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on its contents, but imply that the book consists of six “sections”, with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. The sections, and their conventional names, are: The “herbal” section, Astronomical, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical. (…)

The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with “bullets” on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation. The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are written) flows smoothly, as if the scribe understood what he was writing when it was written; the manuscript does not give the impression that each character had to be calculated before being put on the page.

The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs, usually separated from each other by thin gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20-30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen “weird” characters that occur only once or twice each.

Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 “words” of varying length. These seem to follow phonetic or orthographic laws of some sort; e.g. certain characters must appear in each word (like the vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled but others may not.

Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to natural languages. For instance, the word frequencies follow Zipf’s law, and the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so “labels” attached to the illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page, and may be the name of the plant.

On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript’s “language” is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. For example, there are practically no words with more than ten “letters”, yet there are also few one or two-letter words.

The distribution of letters within the word is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section.

The text seems to be more repetitious than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ only by one letter also repeat with unusual frequency.

There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. In the last page there are four lines of writing which are written in (rather distorted) Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the 15th century, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language.

Also, a series of diagrams in the “astronomical” section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France or the Iberian Peninsula. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text, or were added at a later time. (…)

Dr. Leonell Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript. Strong said that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a “peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet”. Strong claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript does contain sections resembling an herbal, the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where Anthony would have obtained such literary and cryptographic knowledge. (…)

The first section of the book is almost certainly an herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those “herbal” pictures that match “pharmacological” sketches appear to be “clean copies” of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plants seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.

{ Ellie Crystal | Continue reading | Images | Wikipedia }

Its language is unknown and unreadable, though some believe it bears a message from extraterrestrials. Others say it carries knowledge of a civilisation that is thousands of years old.

But now a British academic believes he has uncovered the secret of the Voynich manuscript, an Elizabethan volume of more than 200 pages that is filled with weird figures, symbols and writing that has defied the efforts of the twentieth century’s best codebreakers and most distinguished medieval scholars.

According to computer expert Gordon Rugg of Keele University, the manuscript represents one of the strangest acts of encryption ever undertaken, one that made its creator, Edward Kelley, an Elizabethan entrepreneur, a fortune before his handiwork was lost to the world for more than 300 years. (…)

But now the computer expert and his team believe they have found the secret of the Voynich manuscript.

They have shown that its various word, which appear regularly throughout the script, could have been created using table and grille techniques. The different syllables that make up words are written in columns, and a grille - a piece of cardboard with three squares cut out in a diagonal pattern - is slid along the columns.

The three syllables exposed form a word. The grille is pushed along to expose three new syllables, and a new word is exposed.

Rugg’s conclusion is that Voynichese - the language of the Voynich manuscript - is utter gibberish, put together as random assemblies of different syllables.

{ The Guardian | Wired }

artwork { Paul Klee, Pfeil im Garten (Arrow in the Garden), 1929 | oil and tempera on canvas }

A few days ago I followed a link to Omniglot, a treasure-trove of comparative linguistics for laymen and the lovers of global alphabets, of which I am both. The page I landed on was titled Translations of Hello in many languages and featured a giant three-column table offering standard greetings in 182 languages. (…) a three-column chart? For along with “Language” and “Hello” there was the distinct-yet-apparently-essential column labelled “Hello (on phone).”

Scrutinizing column three got me thinking about how technology, language and culture intersect and interact. It’s fascinating that the telephone would require its own category of greeting—at least for 27 of the 182 languages listed. Moreover, for the vast majority of those, the word for “Hello (on phone)” is a cognate of the English hello—good news for any of us planning to answer the phone in Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Kurdish, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu or Vietnamese. (…)

The history of hello is long and mired in many vowels. Though it didn’t show up in its current form till the mid-19th century, its forbears are many and obvious: hallo, halloo, hillo, holla (a Shakespearean favourite recently returned to slang prominence), hollo, holloa—all generally being a combination get-attention-and-greet, useful for hailing passing boats and that sort of thing.

{ Cardus | Continue reading }

photo { Helen Levitt }

…while politicians occasionally use poker terms when discussing strategy, more of them–and more journalists—put on their game faces with terms from chess.

You would think that people would use that terminology the way chess players use it. Most of the time, however, they’re using the terms colloquially, even though they are using them in a strategic context. While that usage isn’t wrong, it’s not as precise as it could (or should) be. (…)

In chess, a “gambit” is an opening move, one that almost always sacrifices a piece, usually a “pawn.” But its more common use, one sanctioned by most dictionaries, refers to any risky or surprising strategic move: “Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s gambit to include a government-run insurance option in health care legislation has given a fresh tailwind to the idea despite opposition from conservatives,” one news report said.

{ Columbia Journalism Review | Continue reading }

photo { From Russia With Love, 1963 }

Fictitious entries, also known as fake entries, Mountweazels, and Nihilartikels, are deliberately incorrect entries or articles in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps and directories. Entries in reference works normally originate from a reliable external source, but no such source exists for a fictitious entry.

The neologism Mountweazel was coined by the The New Yorker magazine based on a fictitious entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. Another term, Nihilartikel, is of uncertain origin, combining the Latin word nihil, “nothing” with German Artikel, “article.” There is also the specific term “trap street.”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

A trap street is a fictitious street included on a map, often outside the area the map covers, for the purpose of “trapping” potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the “trap street” on their map.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

The town of Agloe, New York was invented by map makers but eventually became a real place.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Allow me to explain “The cat is on the roof” to those of you who are unfamiliar with the joke. It goes like this: Bob goes on vacation. He asks his moron brother to take care of his cat. After a few days on vacation, Bob calls to say hi. The moron brother blurts out “Your cat is dead.”

Bob is beside himself with grief. And he chastises his moron brother for breaking the news to him in such an abrupt manner. The moron brother asks how he could have done it better.

Bob explains “Well, for example, you could have told me the cat was on the roof. The next time we talked, you could say the Fire Department is trying to get him down. The next time, you could say the cat fell during the rescue and was in the veterinarian hospital. The next time I called, you could say the cat succumbed to his injuries and passed away. That way I would be prepared for the bad news.”

The moron brother says he understands. Then he adds, “Oh, by the way. Mom is on the roof.”

{ Scott Adams | Continue reading }

illustration { Mike Giant }

Mopery is a vague and obscure legal term, used in certain jurisdictions to mean “walking down the street with no clear destination or purpose.”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Garry Winogrand }

Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kern }

When we say someone is a warm person, we do not mean that they are running a fever. When we describe an issue as weighty, we have not actually used a scale to determine this. And when we say a piece of news is hard to swallow, no one assumes we have tried unsuccessfully to eat it.

These phrases are metaphorical–they use concrete objects and qualities to describe abstractions like kindness or importance or difficulty–and we use them and their like so often that we hardly notice them. For most people, metaphor, like simile or synecdoche, is a term inflicted upon them in high school English class: “all the world’s a stage,” “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” Gatsby’s fellow dreamers are “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Metaphors are literary creations–good ones help us see the world anew, in fresh and interesting ways, the rest are simply cliches: a test is a piece of cake, a completed task is a load off one’s back, a momentary difficulty is a speed bump.

Metaphors are primarily thought of as tools for talking and writing–out of inspiration or out of laziness, we distill emotions and thoughts into the language of the tangible world. We use metaphors to make sense to one another.

Now, however, a new group of people has started to take an intense interest in metaphors: psychologists. Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. (…) Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think.

{ Boston Globe | Continue reading }

related { Temperature affects how we perceive relationships }