John McWhorter and Matthew Yglesias on the "class skew" of frequently updating identity language

Matthew Yglesias interviews John McWhorter about language, race, police, etc.

Ezra’s on vacation, so I asked @JohnHMcWhorter to come on the Weeds and talk about the changing way we talk about racism and the pros and cons of the Great Awokening. https://t.co/FcG5ceDaSf

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 31, 2020

Listen to the whole thing, but here's a sample:

Yglesias: A lot of what people are doing in this reckoning is actually linguistic in its nature.… I feel like a lot of what happens these days is a strong assumption that changing the way people talk about things is going to beat the racism out of them, or otherwise construct the world, and that we should really judge people based on their … mastery of up-to-date verbal formulas, rather than their actions in the world. And then there comes to be a kind of a weird class skewing to it. Because, I'm very current [with] whatever activists are saying, because, like, this is my job! So I can use "BIPOC" currently, I can do all the things. But just because somebody is, like, 60 and didn't go to college, that's going to really manifest in how they talk, right? And, like, is that really the most important thing?

McWhorter: Yeah, I think we have a problem, in that there is a sense that you can change thought by changing the terms that people use for things. And it's not that changing the terms can't help get a conversation going. But the truth is that if you don't change the thoughts underneath with good old-fashioned suasion, then the labels end up really just kind of floating along, and whatever label you come up with is going to become accreted with whatever negative associations you were worried about before. And then also what you're referring to is the fact that this idea of changing the names of things on a regular basis, and also being often rather condemnatory to people who aren't using the new labels — there is a class skew, there is an education skew.

And so, for example, with "Latinx," … I completely understand the impulse to get past old-fashioned ideas of gender, and to make a space for transgender identification, etc. But the simple truth of "Latinx" is that it's a term used by people, basically, in college towns and maybe a 5-mile radius around them.… For example, I live in a neighborhood where Latinos are, I'm pretty sure, the majority. So I am around Latinos every day. I have never once heard a single person in this neighborhood — Colombians, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans, not to mention many, many, many Dominicans — never heard anybody use the term "Latinx." And I'm listening, and my Spanish is not bad. And it's because it's an elite thing: I hear that at Columbia, I don't hear it among ordinary people.…

This is something that people should think about: "African-American" is something that came down in '89, '90. No one would've expected it. It happened very quickly. For a very long time, "black" was the term, then all of a sudden it was "African-American." And the idea was that "black" had certain negative associations, partly because of the nature of the color and its symbolism, and also because of what many people unfortunately think about black people. So "African-American" was thought of as more positive. It was thought of as something generated from within black people themselves.… Now, say what you want about that — it happened, it really caught on. Look at us now. 30 years later, "African-American" has accreted, for better or worse, all the associations that "black" used to have, such that now some people seem to be moving back towards "black." And some people used to explore, for a while, "person of color," but now apparently that's a narrower definition. The thing is, changing the name can only do so much; it's the thought that really counts.

Dog who knew over 1,000 words dies

The New York Times reports:

John W. Pilley, a professor emeritus of psychology at Wofford College, taught his Border collie to understand more than 1,000 nouns. . . .

For three years, Dr. Pilley trained her four to five hours a day: He showed her an object, said its name up to 40 times, then hid it and asked her to find it. He used 800 cloth animal toys, 116 balls, 26 Frisbees and an assortment of plastic items to ultimately teach Chaser 1,022 nouns.

Chaser died on Tuesday at 15. She had been living with Dr. Pilley’s wife, Sally, and their daughter Robin in Spartanburg. Dr. Pilley died last year at 89. . . .

“What we would really like people to understand about Chaser is that she is not unique,” [John Bianchi’s daughter, Pilley Bianchi, who helped him train Chaser,] said. “It’s the way she was taught that is unique. We believed that my father tapped into something that was very simple: He taught Chaser a concept which he believed worked infinitely greater than learning a hundred behaviors.”

Ms. Bianchi said that her father’s experiment was “uncharted territory” in animal cognition research, pointing to news media coverage calling Chaser “the world’s smartest dog.”

“Her language learning is very high-level, powerful science,” she said. . . .

If Chaser had 30 balls, Ms. Bianchi said, she would be able to understand each one by its proper-noun name and also as a part of a group of objects. “She learned the theory of one to many and many to one, which is learning one object could have many names and many names can apply to one object or one person,” she said.

Greg Nelson, a veterinarian at Central Veterinary Associates in Valley Stream, N.Y., said humans were learning that animals have a deeper understanding of the world around them.

“People have always been under the belief that animals respond to commands based on a rewards system,” he said. “Learn limited commands and tricks, then get a treat.”

But “they do have a language among themselves, spoken and unspoken,” he added. “And it’s apparent that they can understand the human language probably in much the same way as we learn a foreign language.”

You can say the communication in this video starting at 2:08. At first I thought she could be responding to Dr. Pilley's nonverbal cues, as when the owner would move in the direction of the frisbee while asking her where the frisbee is. But then she really does seem to be understanding language when he says: "Chase, to Powderpuff [a doll's name], take frisbee."



Dr. Pilley says in the video:

These kinds of findings definitely show that lower animals, especially dogs, are not just machines with blood. They have emotions, they have mental processes.

There's a better demonstration here, as a seemingly skeptical Neil deGrasse Tyson asks Chaser to find certain toys that are all out of Tyson's view (after 2 minutes in). "I asked Chaser to find 9 toys, and she got every one right. And . . . I chose the toys from this huge pile; neither John [Pilley] nor Chaser saw which ones I picked." She also made a logical inference: when Tyson asked her to find a doll she had never heard of before, "Darwin," out of a group of 9 toys, she chose the only toy she had never seen before.



So I think those videos prove the dog really did understand the words. In the past, I've been willing to call BS on claims of animals with supposedly sophisticated language understanding that seem like scams, as I did with Koko the gorilla (see my last comment in this Facebook post, quoting a skeptical Slate article).

With these kinds of claims of an animal understanding language, there are always going to be those who question whether the animal really has that linguistic understanding, or if what's really going on is the animal is picking up on other cues from the owner. So it's important to take that skepticism seriously and address it directly, in order to show people how much the animal understands.

"You don't know my name, do you?"

A translator's struggle to export Seinfeld to Germany.

The hardest joke to translate, out of 180 episodes, was the one where Jerry doesn't know the name of the woman he's dating, but only knows it "rhymes with a female body part."

Nazi jokes were also dicey:

Seinfeld’s Jewish references posed a unique challenge: as Sebastian explained, "The Germans have a certain you-know-what with the Jewish." Her editor was worried about some of Seinfeld’s Jewish jokes. "We better not say it like that," she remembered her editor saying, "because the Germans may be offended." She added later, recalling the incident to me, "They should be offended, in my understanding. They did it!"

Sebastian appreciated Seinfeld’s direct approach to Jewish history. She wanted to use jokes in direct translation, but the editor wouldn’t let her. She lost several battles. It was a fine line: Der Suppen-Nazi? Sure. . . . An entire episode based on George being mistaken for a neo-Nazi was problematic. So were references to the TV miniseries Holocaust and the film Schindler’s List. Take Elaine’s voiceover narration in "The Subway" episode when her train gets stuck: "We are in a cage. . . . Oh, I can't breathe, I feel faint. Take it easy, it'll start moving soon. Think about the people in the concentration camps, what they went through."

Occasionally, Sebastian triumphed in her conflicts with editors — the practicalities of the show demanded an authentic translation. In an early episode, one of Jerry’s comedy routines addresses the fact that Nazis in World War II movies had "like two separate ‘heils.' They had like the regular ‘heil,’ and then when they were around the offices, they had like this casual ‘heil.’" There was no way to avoid a faithful translation . . .

Auto-tuned conversations

A comic from Zach Weiner's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which is worth checking out regularly:

Memes of yesteryear

So many internet memes are rehashed versions of things that were already cringe-inducingly trite when I was a kid.

". . . said no one ever!" is a throwback to ". . . not!"

"First-world problems!" is a throwback to "Finish your dinner — there are starving children in Africa who would love to have that food!"

The longest word in the English language

A word so long you grow a beard saying it — and (spoiler alert) a plant dies.

"They" singular

Megan McArdle feels strongly about it:

Let me make my position clear: In situations with a generic singular antecedent, "they" is not OK. It is preferable. The attempted abolition of singular "they" was a hypercolossal blunder by 18th- and 19th-century fusspots who thought grammar should follow the same sort of simple rules as a steam engine, that Latin and Greek grammars were a good model for English diction, and that in public-facing activity, men absorbed the women in their circle like a sort of social sponge. We should stop perpetuating their error. We should rip this rule from our grammar texts and obliterate it from our stylebooks. We should fling it down and dance upon it.

Consider the reasons that we are supposed to oppose singular “they” . . .

The linguistic quirks of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama

John McWhorter notices that Romney often says "gosh" and "gee":

“This was back, oh gosh, probably in the late ’70s,” he reminisced to a radio host about a steak house. Or, Romney surmised how his Mormonism would play out during his campaign with, “Oh, I think initially, some people would say, ‘Gosh, I don’t know much about your faith, tell me about it,’ ” as if his G-word fetish were the way just anyone talks these days. Or: Chris Wallace asked whether said faith might be a disadvantage in voter perceptions of him, and Romney exclaimed, “Gee, I hope not!” Then, Romney on carried interest—one is to “say, gosh, is this a true capital investment with a risk of loss?”

McWhorter, a linguist, gives this analysis:

Gee, gosh, and golly are all tokens of dissimulation. They are used in moments of excitement or dismay as burgherly substitutions, either for God and Jesus—words many religious people believe should not be “taken in vain”—or for words considered even less appropriate. . . . The medieval and even colonial Anglophones’ versions of profanity were to express dismay or vent pain by swearing—“making an oath”—to God or related figures considered ill-addressed in such a disrespectful way. The proper person at least muted the impact with a coy distortion, à la today’s shoot and fudge. . . . To increasing numbers of modern Americans, the G-words are unusable outside of quotation marks . . . .

The proscription against swearing “to God” has ever less force. I recall being taught it as a child in the ’70s but being quietly perplexed as to why and wondering what “in vain” meant. Since then, “ohmigod” has become an ordinary remark among even a great many churchgoers. The evasive essence of the G-words, redolent of the Beaver Cleaver 1950s Romney grew up in, has long been rejected as phony, out of line with the let-it-all-hangout essence of the culture. Indicatively, a Web search turns them up endlessly in ironic writing about Romney’s assorted evasions and half-truths during his campaign. The modern American, even if he or she has one of Romney’s Harvard degrees, often uses today’s version of profanity in the slots where Romney slides his G-words. A more, shall we say, vibrant translation of “Gee, I hope not” would be “Shit, I hope not,” and in “This was back, oh gosh, probably in the late ’70s,” “hell” would be substituted for the “oh gosh,” especially after a beer or two. Or, even in more buttoned-up moments, our versions of those sentences might include “Man, I hope not,” and especially for those under about 40, “Dude, I don’t know much about your faith.” Man and dude both reach out to the interlocutor seeking agreement. Man and dude are, at heart, solicitations—“You know what I mean, man/dude?”

This warmer, more personal way of speaking fits with a trend in American English during Romney’s lifetime, in which casual speech styles have occupied ever more of the space that used to be reserved for the more formal. Casual speech always has more room for the folksy reach-out than formal speech does: Witness the use of yo today among younger black people. “Them pants was tight, yo!” I once caught on the subway. The yo isn't the grand old call from a distance—Yo!—the guy’s friend was standing right there. This new yo appended to the ends of sentences has a particular function,reinforcing that you and your conversational partner are on the same page in terms of perspectives and attitudes.

Gee, I don't find the "G" words that odd. I would be much more taken aback if I heard a presidential candidate using "man" or "dude" that way. And surely McWhorter wouldn't seriously advise Romney to start using "yo," at any point in any sentence. By the way, although the headline and the body of the article mention the word "golly" — the squarest of the "G" words — McWhorter doesn't give any example of Romney using that word.

A commenter on the New Republic's website has a good catch:

This article misses the single most antiquated bit of English in Mitt's arsenal: the use of "why" as an interjection. As in, "Why, that's just about the best piece of pie I've ever had!" I think Ward Cleaver was literally the last person in America to use "why" this way. In 2012 it's at best naive-sounding and at worst creepy.

I agree that when Romney uses "Why . . ." at the beginning of an exclamation (instead of a question), he sounds like he's from a bygone era. We all know Romney isn't cool the way President Obama is.

However, though we'll never get tired of poking fun at the quirks of presidential candidates, I wonder whether it would be so bad to have a president whose speaking style is a bit out of touch. If that matters at all, it would mean he'd be slightly less adept at persuading people — either firing up his base, or winning people over to his point of view. If that's one of his main weaknesses, that might not be so bad. Our leaders shouldn't be too persuasive. Obama is so good at connecting — making you feel like he's talking directly to you — that it can be dangerous. After all, he has more power at his fingertips, including military and police forces, than anyone else in the world.

People like Obama, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and Tony Blair can talk you into anything. I sort of prefer the square, stilted politicians like Romney, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore. To me, they seem more "real," because most normal people would not be very adept at convincing a nation of hundreds of millions that "I'm basically like you; we want the same things." Most ordinary citizens who tried to run for president would probably come off as wooden and unhip. The candidate who can connect with most people is actually unlike most people.

Back to McWhorter's article: he says that Obama has "more modern" verbal tics:

This is true not only in the dusting of black inflection he often uses for rhetorical purposes, but in a certain interjectional tic: a particular penchant for you know even in weighty contexts. You know steps outside of the formal, propositional box of a statement to solicit agreement from the listener, rather like a raising of the eyebrows or hands spread outward with palms upward. A dedicated Obama mimic could go a long way in sprinkling develop thoughtful statements with ample you know-age.

"You know" isn't really so modern:

In 1998, I asked a 95-year-old linguist whether he remembered people using like in the hedging way they do now when he was a child, and he said that back then, you know was used in the same way. (I have since been told this by two other nonagenarians.) The difference is that Woodrow Wilson wasn’t given to saying you know in discussing the League of Nations.

I've been struck by how many of the people who appear on Bloggingheads, for instance, will constantly pepper their speech with "you know," which seems to be the erudite version of "like." (A similarly refined substitute for "like" is "sort of.") They've learned that "you know" makes you sound thoughtful and academic, while "like" makes you sound like a teenager. We're supposed to look down on people who constantly use "like," while admiring the nuance of those who use "you know," but neither is more or less meaningful than the other.

Great moments in verbosity

"Would all jurors with last names beginning with the letters A through Z please turn in your forms?"

31 unanswered questions

Slate lists 31 questions submitted by readers to The Explainer that still haven't been answered.

My favorite:

17. Why don't they ever use “presents” in advertisements? It’s always about “gift”-giving, and “gift” ideas, never a “they'll love these as presents.”

IN THE COMMENTS: My mom, Ann Althouse, answers that question:

"Gifts' is clearly the better word. Lots of crisp consonants. One short vowel.

"Presents" has a near homophone: "presence." So it can be confusing. It also has other meanings. And if people are reading the ad, their brain might pronounce it "pree-ZENTS" and that would make it hard to construct the meaning.

"Gift" also has much nicer connotations. I think of "gift of God" and a "gifted artist." There's something exalted and in touch with the divine.

Do birds follow grammar rules?

Maybe.

"It’s not having children that isolates people."

Could the New York Times "Well" blog have quoted a more ambiguous statement?

The quote and the whole blog post is supposed to be a vindication of being single, but you could easily take the quote out of context and make it say the opposite.

How to give a compliment that sticks around

Back in college, a friend of mine who was studying theater mentioned that when he would see a play, he'd make a point afterwards to compliment the actors on details about their performance, instead of just saying, "Great show!" or "Good job!" By expressing an original thought, you demonstrate your sincerity. And your feedback is more likely to be remembered.

Here are a couple compliments I've recently gotten from friends, which will stick with me because of their originality:

"I wish I could put your sense of reason in a bottle and serve it to people."

"Never have I seen someone so opinionated try so hard to diffuse his own opinions."

It took me a while to be sure the latter comment was even a compliment.

PETA calls for a new translation of the Bible that doesn't use "it" to refer to an animal

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)'s vice president says:

"Language matters. Calling an animal 'it' denies them something . . . They are beloved by God. They glorify God."

Well, if you're going to make a proposal, it should be specific and practicable. That's a truism: a proposal is something that can actually be put into practice. Even if everyone agreed that "it" is not ideal, it's far from clear what could replace "it":

David Berger, the dean of Yeshiva University’s Bernard Revel graduate school of Jewish studies, said making the shift in English PETA is requesting would be difficult given the nature of ancient Hebrew.

“In Hebrew all nouns are gender-specific. So the noun for chair is masculine and the noun for earth is feminine. There’s simply no such thing as a neutral noun," Berger told CNN. “It’s unusual to have a noun that would indicate the sex of the animal.”

“In Proverbs it says, 'Look at the ant oh lazy person. See its ways,' " Berger said, quoting the English transition from the book of Proverbs. "In Hebrew it’s 'see her ways.' That's because the word for ant in Hebrew happens to be female. It’s not intended to exclude male ants as far as I know. It’s just an accident the Hebrew word happens to be feminine.”

He said that verse and many others are not intended to single out one sex or the other of the animals.

"It’s a little bit misleading given the fact in English the gender of the pronoun means something. It refers to the masculinity of the person or the animal that’s being referred to. In Hebrew in most cases its just sort of an accident of the masculine or feminine of the pronoun to which it referred," Berger said.

David Lyle Jeffrey, a distinguished professor of literature and the humanities at Baylor University, teaches about ancient texts and the Bible's relationship to literature and the arts.

“I agree with their contention that God cares for all of creation," Jeffrey said. "It is true that we have a responsibility to reflect that affection.

"In gender-inclusive Bible translation the generic terms for humankind, let's say, are then replaced with an emphasis on he or she. Instead of the generic he, you say he and she. I don’t quite see how that would work with animals," Jeffery said.

"Do we need to know the gender of the lion Samson slew? What would it give us there?" he said. "You could try to specify that, but you would be doing so entirely inventively if you did. It's not in the original language. ... Nothing is made of it in the story." . . .

"When you get to the point when you say, 'Don’t say it, say he or she' when the text doesn’t, you’re both screwing up the text and missing the main point you addressed."

Aside from all that, I have another problem with PETA's campaign. I agree with the principle behind what PETA is saying, and I support the essential mission of PETA itself. But I often find the way they implement their mission to be highly unfortunate, and I don't see why they thought this was a good move.

Vegetarians, vegans, and animal-rights activists are already perceived as left-wing radicals who are out of sync with mainstream American culture. So, what does PETA choose as a target? The Bible! The folks at PETA might be vegetarians, but they have a cannibalistic tendency to feed off of the weaknesses of their own kind.

"It's a chemical world."

"Learn to live with it."

A friend of mine posts that link to Facebook and asks:

Can we ditch "all-natural" while we're at it?

Random thoughts

Some random thoughts (with apologies to Thomas Sowell and The Church of Rationality):

1. I don't understand speed readers unless they're also speed thinkers.

2. People who use the word "perhaps" usually mean: "I'm so right about this that I need to make it sound humble."

3. "Natural" is used as a justification, and "unnatural" is used as a condemnation. But no one applies this consistently.

4. One of the most persistent biases is success. We care more about what causes success than about what causes failure.

The Simpson embiggens the English language.

Language Log calls out the Economist for using the Simpsons neologism "embiggened":

If a future turn of events in Africa was seen as requiring the island’s military role to be embiggened and its facilities rendered much more secure, it might be convenient if the islanders had no legal right to remain where they were.

The Economist writer seems to have had no inkling that there was anything humorous about the word. As Euguene Volokh points out, the rest of the sentence isn't especially funny. In fact, it's quite dour. So is the rest of the article (a series of dispatches from an isolated island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean called Ascension).

Language Log points us to the Wikipedia entry on the Simpsons episode that originally used "embiggen" (I've omitted the numerous footnotes and links here):

The show runners asked the writers if they could come up with two words which sounded like real words . . . . The Springfield town motto is "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man." Schoolteacher Edna Krabappel comments that she never heard the word embiggens until she moved to Springfield. Miss Hoover, another teacher, replies, "I don’t know why; it’s a perfectly cromulent word." Later in the episode, while talking about Homer’s audition for the role of town crier, Principal Skinner states, "He's embiggened that role with his cromulent performance."

Embiggen—in the context it is used in the episode—is a verb that was coined by Dan Greaney in 1996. [That is, a Simpsons writer coined it for the episode.] The verb previously occurred in an 1884 edition of the British journal Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc. by C. A. Ward, in the sentence "but the people magnified them, to make great or embiggen, if we may invent an English parallel as ugly. After all, use is nearly everything." The literal meaning of embiggen is to make something larger. . . . [E]mbiggen can be found in string theory. The first occurrence of the word was in the journal High Energy Physics in the article "Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking", which was published on January 23, 2007. For example, the article says: "For large P, the three-form fluxes are dilute, and the gradient of the Myers potential encouraging an anti-D3 to embiggen is very mild." Later this usage was noted in the journal Nature, which explained that in this context, it means to grow or expand.

Cromulent is an adjective that was coined by David S. Cohen. [Actually, he was forced to change his name and is now David X. Cohen.] Since it was coined it has appeared in the Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English. The meaning of cromulent is inferred only from its usage, which indicates that it is a positive attribute. Webster's Dictionary defines it as meaning fine or acceptable.

Language Log says Dan Greaney might join "the very select club of people who invented words that make it into major dictionaries."

In a blog post entitled "Beyond embiggens and cromulent," a linguist named Heidi Harley gave an amusingly analytical list of Simpsons jokes that play with language.

She followed this up every year for the next few years: 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.

Caution: Reading these posts can use up hours of your time. I just read the first 5 in the first list, and I'm delighted by all of them. I like this one so much I have Moe's remark in my list of "favorite quotes" on Facebook:

The Simpsons' house has been broken into on Christmas eve, and all their Christmas presents and decorations stolen. Homer is telling his woes to Moe. Moe says, "You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society!"

Can you improve your blog comments by using esoteric terminology?

Robin Hanson, the blogger of Overcoming Bias, strongly endorses this idea by Eli Dourado about how to keep a high level of quality in your blog's comments section:

On small blogs, people typically comment when they have something to contribute or ask that is relevant to the post. These are frequently of high quality. … On more popular blogs, this positive commenting dynamic is confounded by the presence of eyeballs. Every post is read by many thousands of people. For the self-involved who could never attract such a large audience on their own, this is an irresistible forum for expounding pet hypotheses, axe-grinding, and generally shouting at or expressing meaningless agreement with the celebrity post-authors.

The first step, therefore, to higher quality comments is “be more niche.” Discourage your marginal readers with technical language, obscure references, and lengthy posts. Your marginal readers are not of high value anyway, and driving them away is an excellent way to improve the average comment of your inframarginal readers.

(I'm going to refer to these as Hanson's views, since I have the impression that Hanson is at least as enthusiastic about them as Dourado is. Overcoming Bias is the more popular of the two blogs, so the point is more relevant to Hanson -- and, indeed, he does seem to put this advice into practice.)

People are rarely as explicitly elitist as Hanson is here, though his reasoning is often used -- at least in other contexts.

I empathize with him in wanting to keep out certain commenters from your blog. (As you know if you've ever posted a comment here and read my notice, I've occasionally had to ban commenters.) But it's an open question how to identify which commenters should be excluded. The most obvious way is to judge the comments as they come in and delete them if they're not the kind of contribution you want. This is more aggressive but also more fine-tuned than what Hanson is describing. His approach is passive-aggressive, but that's not the main problem with it.

The problem is that he presupposes that the people whose comments he and his readers would benefit from reading are those who either already have a certain high-level education (which is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status) or have taken the time to absorb his blog's idiolect. Of course, I just used an esoteric term of art -- it's hard to avoid. But we should reach for these terms only when they allow us to express our thoughts more clearly, not as invisible barriers to keep out a poorly defined group of people we imagine are beneath us.

Do different languages create "fascinatingly different Ways of Looking at the World"?

Nope, says linguist John McWhorter in a review of Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher. (Here's an excerpt from the book.)

"As cool as it would be if grammar were thought, the idea is a myth — at least in any form that would be of interest beyond academic psychologists."

McWhorter recognizes that differences in language lead to some differences in thought — just not fascinating or profound differences. A couple examples:

Speakers of languages with gender are more likely to imagine — if asked on a survey, which typically they never are — feminine nouns talking with higher voices than masculine ones. So, your French friend, if you woke her up in the middle of the night, would be more likely to imagine a table — feminine la table — talking like Meryl Streep than you would. OK — but is this “a way of looking at the world”? Does your friend think of tables as ladies? Ask her — she doesn’t.

Or — many languages have a word that covers both green and blue. Call it “grue.” Their speakers distinguish blue and green very slightly less quickly than English speakers do. Is this a “world view”? I can only quote my erstwhile UC Berkeley colleague Paul Kay with Willett Kempton here: “If the differences in world view are to be interesting, they must be sizeable. Minuscule differences are dull.”

The dating site OKCupid racially profiles its own users.

Draw your own conclusions.