@bfk
Interestingly enough, to some degree, yes.
Studies have found that languages which have more separate names for a color’s shades are more sensative to differences in shades of that color than another culture with fewer names.
My wife, the best damn philosopher I’ve ever known…seriously, has a saying that we imagine so that we do (I’m paraphrasing - she says it better).
For example - we imagine flight firstly as pure fiction so we chase it and make it happen.
Essentially, if we put it out there as an imagining of what we will do, especially if we repeat that imagining a hell of a lot, then we will eventually do it because we’ve collectively programmed ourselves to do it over time.
The power of stories is the reality they make (Terry Pratchett).
So to a degree, our language (in full scope) in part creates or sense of reality.
I ran into this a lot studying anthropology.
The etymology of a word opened a lot about a culture’s perception of reality.
Ancient Hebrew used the same root for a viper and bronze, and both showed up in allegories of wise and foolish men. The point was that both of these things required experience to know how to get something out of them, or you could get hurt. Knowledge alone wasn’t enough.
For “eternity” or “forever”, they rooted into the shared word for horizon. It basically meant more than can be seen.
To their cultural mind, reality was defined by what they knew, and then strapped to it for a while in a reverse loop. The viper eventually became bronze and bronze a viper, they became interchangable ideas.
The Greeks’ word Logos didn’t just mean words. It meant that an idea was given form, spoken, and then entered into another mind where it would program the receiving mind (using our terms to convey their notion here).
They had laws against speech. If you said something and someone went off and did something bad as a result of what you said, then you could be charged because you bore that reality into existence with your words. They were a sort of spirit reality.
It was really cool to see how language shaped thought.
@Artificer
One of my favorite marketing tales was from business class in college. I can’t recall the names and details anymore, but basically it was sometime around Macy’s era and a department store couldn’t move dresses, even when put on sale. A fellow added.99 cents to the original price and they started selling because people assumed a .99 ending price was a sale price and meant it was a deal - yet they were buying higher than it was before.
I like that one.
In that same class, we did a study for our fake business where we hung red paper on the right and the left - alternating, and wrote down how many people noticed the paper out of everyone who passed by the hallway.
The right side won outright. We wanted to know where to put the coffee shop in a book store - to the left or right? Which would people subliminally be blind to? Left, turns out to be the answer in our culture.
I loved marketing psychology. It was like designing magic tricks.
Cheers,
Jayson
