Words have meanings, but they also have histories. The term "Paddy Wagon" is defined in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as "an enclosed motortruck used by police to carry prisoners." That definition is adequate, if all you want to know is what people are talking about when they use that term. But if this definition is all you ever know about the term, you will be baffled by the fact that people of Irish descent usually take offense when they hear that term used. To understand why they have that reaction, you need to know where that expression came from. You need to know that "paddy" is a derogatory way of referring to an Irish person or a person of Irish descent, and you need to know that there used to be (and maybe still is) a stereotyped belief that people of Irish descent are more likely than others to drink heavily and to become rowdy and disorderly -- so disorderly that police must come and pick them up by the "wagon"-load. Originally, bigoted people who used the expression "paddy wagon" to...

As a matter of fact, there are some psychologists and psycholinguists investigating the very question you ask. Lera Boroditsky, at Stanford University, has data that suggest that speakers of languages that use broad gender marking do associate more feminine characteristics with things whose names are marked as feminine, and more masculine traits with things whose names are marked as masculine. You can read a summary of that research here: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf She argues that these and other data show that language shapes thought. However, psycholinguists at U Penn (Lila Gleitman and John Trueswell), and at Delaware (Anna Papafragou) argue against the view that language shapes thought in this way. (Here's a link to a very readable paper by Gleitman and Papafragou on this topic: http://papafragou.psych.udel.edu/papers/Language%20and%20thought.pdf I don't think that Frye's case depends on how this particular debate comes out. Her point is that there are ...

The surface grammar of the sentence “It’s hot in here” suggests that the sentence is about an objective state of the room. Let’s start there. There are two features of the assertion of this sentence that make you think it might not be about the temperature of the room: first, the assertion is based on a subjective experience of mine, and second, it uses the vague term “hot”. Let’s start with the first consideration. Notice that any claim anyone makes about contingent states of the external world is, if it’s a justified claim, going to be based on that person’s sensory experiences. If I say “You forgot to turn off the burner on the stove,” my claim will probably be based on seeing the flame, but my statement is a statement about the burner, not about my visual experience. Or if I say, “Something’s burning,” it’s probably because I smell the scorched butter, but it’s still the butter I’m talking about. (Guess what I did this morning making breakfast.) Contrast these cases with cases where I...

The project of "improving" "the" language is one that has captured the imaginations of many people over time, but it seems to me to be a foolish one to undertake. Let me explain, by explaining my use of scare quotes. First: "the" language. There's no such thing. If you look at speakers of so-called "English," you'll find that they will differ in their vocabularies, in their grammars, and above all, in the emotional and aesthetic associations they attach to their words. What binds us together is merely the fact that we can to a significant degree understand each other's verbal behavior. But the engines of linguistic change are perpetual motion machines. Slang, idioms, metaphors, abbreviations, invented words -- they all pop in and out of existence, and they're all good. Amidst all this variety, talk of "the" English language is nothing more than abstract idealization -- useful for some scientific purposes, perhaps, but not to be thought of as literally true of human linguistic activity....

I completely agree with you: it does seem plausible that noninclusive language fosters or reflects sexist thought and behavior, but it is in fact an empirical issue. This is, as it happens, a hot topic among psycholinguists at the moment. The research of Stanford psychologist Lera Boroditsky (view some of the work here: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/ ) suggests that how we talk does affect how we think, and in particular, that the gender coding of nouns affects the properties we attribute to their referents. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Lila Gleitman has evidence, however, that how we talk has virtually no effect on how we think. I couldn't find a link to relevant work of hers, but here's her homepage: http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~gleitman/ There's probably a lot of relevant work in social psychology, among scholars who study the development of stereotypes and so forth, but I don't know that literature. Colleagues? Benjamin Whorf took the idea that talk...

Your dance teacher is correct in thinking that some philosophers believe that there cannot be thought without language, but not that all philosophers believe this. I do not, for example. There was a very similar question to yours that I answered a while back. Check out question 953 .

There are two competing views on this. The first view -- possibly the more popular view among philosophers -- is that thought and language are essentially tied together, so that there cannot be one without the other. (Leave aside all the evidence from casual observation that it's all too possible to talk without thinking). The argument for this view appeals to the evidence we generally need for attributing thoughts to others -- namely, verbal behavior. (You can read a good example of this sort of argument in an article by Donald Davidson called "Thought and Talk." ) There is also the consideration you raise, that thinking sort of "feels" like talking silently to oneself. But the inconvenient thing about this view is that it requires us to deny that pre-verbal children and animals have thought. And while we don't have all the evidence for attributing thinking to such beings that we have in the case of fully verbal adults, we do nonetheless have lots of evidence that such beings think. ...