What you see isn't so much what you get

British researchers with amusing accents recently suggested that your language not only effects how you express colors, but also how you perceive them. The best example: In Namibia they only have five color words.  There isn't a difference between the word for "green" and the word for "blue." So, when you show a Namibian a circle of blue dots with one green dot in it, it takes them a very long time to discover that there is one dot that is somehow different.  The words they had to use to describe color actually shaped how they physically saw that color, conceptualized it, applied it.

Imagine, then, the difference between growing up in a world (1) where you had and knew a word for each organ's insertion into each individual orifice that took into account the gender and active or passive status (check that Best Grid Ever post below) or (2) where you had the words "straight," "gay," "fuck," "cunnilingus," and "fellatio" to work with.  Obviously we grow up with a much smaller sexual lexicon than a Romans did, and as a consequence I think we fit the world we see into a much narrower descriptive framework, glossing over a shitload of details in the process.  We've lost/ignored the ability to conceptualize sex as neither "gay" nor "straight" because we don't have words for anything like that.  I shall now stick it to the rest of the English-speaking world by describing activities using the Latin words for them...

But, seriously - mind-boggling study.

Frenching

A friend of mine wrote an excellent book.  It's now a NY Times bestseller.  And that's encouraging for me, because its story is couched in the mentality that this little experiment espouses.

The book is French Lessons, and the friend is Ellen Sussman.  It follows three French language tutors and their students around Paris (literally, there are maps).  Perhaps because zey are French, or perhaps because Ellen and I have similar conceptions of the meaning of sex, everyone pretty much gets down with one or more of the other characters somewhere in the book. And this lady can write some sex.

Given that Ellen is the most happily married lady I know,  I am particularly impressed that she manages to wrap her head around the concept that some sex is just sex.  A few characters are married.  Sometimes married characters are devoutly faithful to their spouse.  Sometimes they are not.  And I love it.   Each sexual or near-sexual encounter is written to convey the purpose of that encounter.  Sex isn't always about love.  That's something the last 2000 years of Christianity have distorted.  Sometimes you just wanna get your freak on.  French Lessons gets that.  And Ellen was bitchin enough to keep a bit of this polyamority even when the man told her the public would be offended.

Here's to all the folks with the balls to say "I don't care if you're offended, this shit is good."