Colors
radiolab.orgSaved by Ben Percifield
Colors
On the one hand, language is a wonderful tool. It allows us to describe these other worlds in metaphors that help us think and imagine them. But there are many places where our language leaves us in the lurch. Like with vision, we don’t have a word for detecting light but not having a conscious experience of it.
ed yong • What Counts as Seeing
When we knew every face intimately, there was no need to generalize into “people.” Our ancestors experienced a richness of intimacy that we can hardly imagine today, living as we do among strangers. It is not only social richness that is muffled underneath our words, it is the entirety of sensual experience. Margaret Mead once observed, “For those
... See moreCharles Eisenstein • The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
In Through the Language Glass, the linguist Guy Deutscher reports that many primitive populations, without being color-blind, have verbal designations for only two or three colors.