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.
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