Your imagination is limited to what you can express in words. Many cultures have biases in their language towards or away from certain concepts. Consider how the eskimos have 5 words for snow or the prudish american landscape had no word for “sex” for most of its history. Instead you had to say things like “lay with someone” and such. This is to bias your thought away from undesirable concepts.
The word copulate has been around since the late 1400’s (before the colonization of North America by Europe) and Old English had the word hǽmed which dates back to the middle ages.
You are confusing euphemism with language and applying puritanical systemic manipulation to language. That is censorship and it does not mean that the words don’t exist in the language. Whole different can of worms.
Yes, it has been proven that language and having words to describe things changes the way the brain processes things. There are languages without a word to describe the color Blue, and in fact the people who speak that language struggle to differentiate it from green when tested. Once teaching them a language which includes a word for the color, eventually their brain begins to be able to differentiate it.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180419-the-words-that-change-the-colours-we-see
Well jokes on them because I frequently think about things that I then struggle to articulate and its very frustrating! Though more seriously I wouldn’t say language is a hard limit because otherwise we would never need to come up with new words in the first place.
Your imagination is limited to what you can express in words. Many cultures have biases in their language towards or away from certain concepts. Consider how the eskimos have 5 words for snow or the prudish american landscape had no word for “sex” for most of its history. Instead you had to say things like “lay with someone” and such. This is to bias your thought away from undesirable concepts.
The word copulate has been around since the late 1400’s (before the colonization of North America by Europe) and Old English had the word hǽmed which dates back to the middle ages.
You are confusing euphemism with language and applying puritanical systemic manipulation to language. That is censorship and it does not mean that the words don’t exist in the language. Whole different can of worms.
Yes, it has been proven that language and having words to describe things changes the way the brain processes things. There are languages without a word to describe the color Blue, and in fact the people who speak that language struggle to differentiate it from green when tested. Once teaching them a language which includes a word for the color, eventually their brain begins to be able to differentiate it. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180419-the-words-that-change-the-colours-we-see
it might also be noteworthy that if you’re not allowed to say a word as a child, basically it doesn’t exist to you. that’s censoring.
Well jokes on them because I frequently think about things that I then struggle to articulate and its very frustrating! Though more seriously I wouldn’t say language is a hard limit because otherwise we would never need to come up with new words in the first place.