Banning Gender Pronouns Because They’re Microaggressions

[Hakurei Reimu]

Sure, it happened in a different way, but it still happened. Who's to say it can't happen again? As I mentioned, people already use 'they' as a third person singular when gender is ambiguous. It's not hard to imagine that with enough people doing so intentionally it could catch on as a full replacement. Sweden's already trying it out with 'hen.'

I already use 'they' as a third person singular ambiguous gender pronoun. I still use 'he' and 'she' a lot, because for most conversation I actually do know the gender of the person I'm referring to, and they have no problem with either 'he' or 'she,' and in fact would be insulted if I didn't. 'He/she' is only 'problematic' to identity politics twits.

I also don't think the argument that 'sie' is three different words really stands up. Not that it isn't true, it just seems to me that it really works in the favor of the change. Written form aside, Germans pronounce and conjugate 'Sie' as in 'you' and 'sie' as in 'they' exactly the same way and are able to understand which is being used through context, so it stands to reason that the same could be true of singular and plural 'they' in English. The two would be different words by any reasonable definition. I'm not saying it's destined to be so or anything like that, but I also don't see any good reason to think the other way. Languages change, often in unpredictable ways.

There is some unpredictability, but it's not random. The more people use a language feature, the more it sticks around. The University of Kansas notwithstanding, in 99% of language use, 'he/she' are used with no problem, and would sound weird and stilted without them.

Fun thought: what if 'him' and 'her' become the next 'nigger'?

Unlikely. There are actually very few contexts where an ambiguous singular third person pronoun would make sense. Outside those contexts, there's actually little call and cause for it â€" in most cases you are explicitly talking about people who would unambiguously identify with 'he' or 'she.' Even in the unlikely event they do become the next 'nigger,' they would be replaced with some kind of equivalent that those who find 'he/she' problematic would find equally problematic. There's simply no pleasing identity politics twits.

[aitm]

Fun thought: what if 'him' and 'her' become the next 'nigger'?

CAUTION: Sounds and seems racist…..not really intended that way!!


Any of you ever listen to some blacks talking to each other anymore? They have regressed the language so much and taken so much excuse with pronunciation that even they cannot understand each other.  I know some of you will get all pissy but listen. The conversation becomes a battle of asking twice what was said. Try it. Even face to face the conversion entails one person making a statement, the other person asking "what" then a repeat of the statement then the second person responding then the first person asking "what" to the first person repeating then the second responding to the first person asking "what" and  on and on..really!  Try it one time..very  very  depressing.

[Hydra009]

Even face to face the conversion entails one person making a statement, the other person asking "what" then a repeat of the statement then the second person responding then the first person asking "what" to the first person repeating then the second responding to the first person asking "what" and  on and on..really!

[peacewithoutgod]

I will agree that English has evolved to become lazier. When was the last time anyone actually used words like "hence" or "hither" or "thither"?

Shit's just here or there nowadays. I hear "whom" is due to fall off the educational standard any time now by colloquial majority that just favors "who" in all cases. Whatever.

Pronouns will be much, much harder to shake. Imagine 200 years from now and sleazy harlequin romance novels from Walmart being akin to Beowulf with frustrated teenagers lamenting frustration over this "his" and "hers" and "he" and "she" stuff.

Good luck to them. It's much easier to stop using a word altogether than it is to train yourself to substitute another word, especially when they are words used so frequently.

Who would have thought the euphemism treadmill would work its way down to to two and three letter words? It's kind of impressive when you think about it.

Interesting point that English is getting lazier, yet is still ridiculously more complex than other languages spoken in Western Europe. Many have universal pronouns and other words of dual context where English is less ambiguous. This is why the Romantic languages are regarded as much easier to learn than English (shorter vocabulary and simpler rules). It's harder to learn, but it's also the world business language. No doubt it owes this to being of the historically most world-dominant power, but I have often wondered if it deserves credit for more than that, for its facilitation of more precise exchanges - does it make communication breakdowns more preventable? If so, then maybe we should hold on to that complexity.

[missingnocchi]

I already use 'they' as a third person singular ambiguous gender pronoun. I still use 'he' and 'she' a lot, because for most conversation I actually do know the gender of the person I'm referring to, and they have no problem with either 'he' or 'she,' and in fact would be insulted if I didn't. 'He/she' is only 'problematic' to identity politics twits.

I don't know if I would use the word 'problematic' considering the group that word has become associated with in gender politics, but I don't think 'he' and 'she' are innocent. Language has a marked effect on psychology, exemplified in studies which have shown a link between the number of 'standard' color words in a language and the ability of the speakers to perceive and remember colors. Here's an article on one such study, though there are plenty to choose from: http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb05/hues.aspx

There is some unpredictability, but it's not random. The more people use a language feature, the more it sticks around. The University of Kansas notwithstanding, in 99% of language use, 'he/she' are used with no problem, and would sound weird and stilted without them.

True, but it has to start somewhere. English has lost an incredible amount of conjugative variation - many if not most verbs no longer conjugate at all between person and number, only tense and mood have stuck around mostly intact for whatever reason. I don't doubt that would sound weird and stilted to, say, Chaucer. What he knew as 'luvien, I luve, thou luvest, he/sche/hit luveth' has become 'to love, I love, you love, he/she/it loves.' Four conjugative forms became two. It would certainly sound weird and stilted to start saying 'he/she/it love,' but that's essentially what happened to 'luvest' and 'luvien.'

Unlikely. There are actually very few contexts where an ambiguous singular third person pronoun would make sense. Outside those contexts, there's actually little call and cause for it â€" in most cases you are explicitly talking about people who would unambiguously identify with 'he' or 'she.' Even in the unlikely event they do become the next 'nigger,' they would be replaced with some kind of equivalent that those who find 'he/she' problematic would find equally problematic. There's simply no pleasing identity politics twits.

Yeah, that wasn't a serious point. They'll try though, these people are Poe's Law incarnate. Every time someone comes up with an absurd parody to mock them with, they actually adopt it into their worldview (see: transniggers, white people who identify as black).

[Baruch]

Transblack?  Really?  Is that the opposite of Oreos?  Or more obtuse ... reverse trans-black?  Isn't that what Obama really is?

Or just moving toward the Bladerunner model?
http://bladerunner.wikia.com/wiki/Cityspeak

[Hakurei Reimu]

I don't know if I would use the word 'problematic' considering the group that word has become associated with in gender politics, but I don't think 'he' and 'she' are innocent. Language has a marked effect on psychology, exemplified in studies which have shown a link between the number of 'standard' color words in a language and the ability of the speakers to perceive and remember colors. Here's an article on one such study, though there are plenty to choose from: http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb05/hues.aspx

You know who uses the most color words? Painters and interior decorators. They have an extensive specialized vocabulary for colors, because their professions are critically dependent on the use of colors. I might not be able to tell the difference between dark beige and roasted sesame seed, but I'm sure that someone whose livelihood depended on telling the difference could tell at a glance, and placed side-by-side, I can visually see that they are distinct colors. But a rich color language didn't cause painters and interior designers to become very good at color choice; that rich color language was developed for use by those professions. The long and short of it is that at best such studies only show a correlation, but not causation, between psychology and language.

Japanese doesn't have grammatical gender, but the Japanese culture is absolutely aware of the human sexual dichotomy. In fact, the Japanese and the assorted Chinese cultures (both have no grammatical gender) are some of the most sexually divided societies I know of.

True, but it has to start somewhere. English has lost an incredible amount of conjugative variation - many if not most verbs no longer conjugate at all between person and number, only tense and mood have stuck around mostly intact for whatever reason. I don't doubt that would sound weird and stilted to, say, Chaucer. What he knew as 'luvien, I luve, thou luvest, he/sche/hit luveth' has become 'to love, I love, you love, he/she/it loves.' Four conjugative forms became two. It would certainly sound weird and stilted to start saying 'he/she/it love,' but that's essentially what happened to 'luvest' and 'luvien.'

Who says it has to start anywhere? It is the height of linguistic hubris to assume that anyone knows where the English language is going, much less direct it anywhere (the French tried, but utterly failed). Human language always evolves to fit the golden mean between richness of expression and brevity.

Ironically, by making gender a big deal, identity politics twits may be doing more to ensure that 'he/she' continues to be used past its lifetime were they to just leave well-enough alone.

Yeah, that wasn't a serious point. They'll try though, these people are Poe's Law incarnate. Every time someone comes up with an absurd parody to mock them with, they actually adopt it into their worldview (see: transniggers, white people who identify as black).

Yes. Sadly, these idiots will always be with us.

[missingnocchi]

You know who uses the most color words? Painters and interior decorators. They have an extensive specialized vocabulary for colors, because their professions are critically dependent on the use of colors. I might not be able to tell the difference between dark beige and roasted sesame seed, but I'm sure that someone whose livelihood depended on telling the difference could tell at a glance, and placed side-by-side, I can visually see that they are distinct colors. But a rich color language didn't cause painters and interior designers to become very good at color choice; that rich color language was developed for use by those professions. The long and short of it is that at best such studies only show a correlation, but not causation, between psychology and language.

These are developmental studies performed in children, not done by asking people how many colors they can name and then testing their abilities to perceive it. The antithetical theory would be that the people speaking the languages inherently have different abilities to perceive color, leading to the linguistic difference. The fact that the children who didn't yet know color terms had similar test results in both English and Namibian children, only to differ once their respective languages' color terms were taught to them, does not lend much support to that theory. This is also far from the only area in which language has been shown to effect psychology. People who speak languages with no future tense have been shown to be far more predisposed to saving money: http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf

Japanese doesn't have grammatical gender, but the Japanese culture is absolutely aware of the human sexual dichotomy. In fact, the Japanese and the assorted Chinese cultures (both have no grammatical gender) are some of the most sexually divided societies I know of.

Japanese doesn't have pronouns referring specifically to men or women, but they do have pronouns exclusively used by men or women. That's arguably a much stronger linguistic gender barrier. You certainly have a point with Chinese, but I'm still unconvinced. It's not that I think he/she pronouns are the only source of the tension between genders, just that it's an unnecessary one. Clearly the historical and cultural forces in China have far outweighed it, whatever degree of influence you might think it has. Still, there is a huge array of languages with no gender pronouns:

It stands to reason that within that group there would be a wide spectrum of relationships between the sexes.

Who says it has to start anywhere? It is the height of linguistic hubris to assume that anyone knows where the English language is going, much less direct it anywhere (the French tried, but utterly failed).

Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I meant more to say that any given linguistic change has to have started somewhere. Also, the French may have failed to change French, but they certainly succeeded in changing English ;)

Human language always evolves to fit the golden mean between richness of expression and brevity.

It's a factor, but if it were the only one I don't think we'd see nearly as much linguistic variation as we have today. Culture, relationships between neighboring languages, and good old fashioned random bullshit all have prominent roles to play, and more importantly, they all holistically interrelate with one another and with psychology.

[aitm]

well,  if you have told me you could find a graph that depicts the usage of pronouns in various languages......

[pr126]

A Brief History of the English Language

In the beginning there was an island off the coast of Europe. It had no name, for the natives had no language, only a collection of grunts and gestures that roughly translated to "Hey!", "Gimme!", and "Pardon me, but would you happen to have any wood?"

Then the Romans invaded it and called it Britain, because the natives were "blue, nasty, br(u->i)tish and short." This was the start of the importance of u (and its mispronunciation) to the language. After building some roads, killing off some of the nasty little blue people and walling up the rest, the Romans left, taking the language instruction manual with them.

The British were bored so they invited the barbarians to come over (under Hengist) and "Horsa" 'round a bit. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes brought slightly more refined vocal noises.

There is more...

[peacewithoutgod]

You know, all this policing of protected free speech could lead our society down a very dark road - 'scuse me if I'm racist for saying that!

[Atheon]

Thai has gender distinctions in the first person, in the formal register. There is also a feminine 3rd person pronoun, which is not always used.

Thai has LOTS of pronouns. Many registers, including intimate, familiar, formal, vulgar, clerical and royal. It's quite a maze!

[Hakurei Reimu]

These are developmental studies performed in children, not done by asking people how many colors they can name and then testing their abilities to perceive it. The antithetical theory would be that the people speaking the languages inherently have different abilities to perceive color, leading to the linguistic difference. The fact that the children who didn't yet know color terms had similar test results in both English and Namibian children, only to differ once their respective languages' color terms were taught to them, does not lend much support to that theory.

The studies you cite test children's their ability for them to be primed on certain colors, and noting that the color differences they do see as relevant. You will find that no two objects are exactly the same color, so some chunking is required for you to get anywhere. So, yeah, if you have fewer color words, you won't be as primed to memorize different objects based on their color as someone who has a lot of color words. However, this has nothing to do with hue perception, because in those exact same groups, if you ask about what objects those colors come closest to, they will be comparable no matter how many color words they have.

Remember what I said about interior decorators and painters? I don't have nearly the color vocabulary that either would have, yet I can take a look at a color choice palette and immediately tell that all the little squares of color are indeed different colors no matter how my vocabulary may chunk them. I can perceive the difference in color, and tell you how those two colors are different.

This is also far from the only area in which language has been shown to effect psychology. People who speak languages with no future tense have been shown to be far more predisposed to saving money: http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf

The paper completely ignores the role of culture and geography in saving money. If you're not into buying a lot of stuff, then saving money is much easier. The Japanese, for instance, live on this teeny-tiny island where space is very much at a premium, and is very resource-poor. They just don't have a lot of space to put a lot of stuff, and the stuff they do buy is expensive and so want to keep around for a good long while, so they tend to be better at saving money for that reason alone.

Japanese doesn't have pronouns referring specifically to men or women, but they do have pronouns exclusively used by men or women. That's arguably a much stronger linguistic gender barrier.

AHAHAHAHA! Believe me, both sexes can use each other pronouns just fine. When they do use each other's pronouns, they shape others' perceptions of them, but they still understand each other just fine even with the mismatch. Using another sex's pronouns doesn't change the semantics of the sentence. This is completely unlike pronouns with proper grammatical gender, where changing the pronoun can indeed change the meaning of the sentence. Compare

   Sally gave David her pencil.

with

   Sally gave David his pencil.

These two statements describe a different scenario. Your Japanese gendered language equivalent would not describe different scenarios.

Also, Japanese doesn't have grammatical number either, in any form, yet they are able to tell the difference between a single person and many people, even if they have to glark it from context.

You certainly have a point with Chinese, but I'm still unconvinced. It's not that I think he/she pronouns are the only source of the tension between genders, just that it's an unnecessary one.

Really? The only people I see making any sort of deal about 'he/she' are the identity politics twits. I'm fine with people using gendered pronouns when talking about me, and so is everyone I know. The only real use I see for genderless pronouns are when addressing a generic person in a mixed group of people, when there is genuine ambiguity whom you might be talking to.

There's clearly a difference between men and women, and there's no inherent problem with making that distinguishment in grammatical gender. It's only a big deal to those people who have arbitrarily decided to make it a big deal.

Clearly the historical and cultural forces in China have far outweighed it, whatever degree of influence you might think it has.

It doesn't show up in their language, but it certainly does show up elsewhere. Going as far as to commit infantacide on female babies and aborting female fetuses disproportionately is as severe as it gets.

Still, there is a huge array of languages with no gender pronouns:

It stands to reason that within that group there would be a wide spectrum of relationships between the sexes.

Which you are simply assuming.

Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I meant more to say that any given linguistic change has to have started somewhere. Also, the French may have failed to change French, but they certainly succeeded in changing English ;)It's a factor, but if it were the only one I don't think we'd see nearly as much linguistic variation as we have today. Culture, relationships between neighboring languages, and good old fashioned random bullshit all have prominent roles to play, and more importantly, they all holistically interrelate with one another and with psychology.

Again, language evolves to meet the needs of the culture that uses it. Any sort of SWH junk put forward runs right into the problem of what caused what â€" why does the language under study have the linguistic features and lexical distribution it has? The people find the language to describe what they need to describe. This I think is a very straightforward connection from the language used to the psychology.

[missingnocchi]

Long ass post, so I'm spoilering it.
[spoiler]

The studies you cite test children's their ability for them to be primed on certain colors, and noting that the color differences they do see as relevant. You will find that no two objects are exactly the same color, so some chunking is required for you to get anywhere. So, yeah, if you have fewer color words, you won't be as primed to memorize different objects based on their color as someone who has a lot of color words. However, this has nothing to do with hue perception, because in those exact same groups, if you ask about what objects those colors come closest to, they will be comparable no matter how many color words they have.

Will they, though? I don't know of any studies where that particular avenue was explored. It would certainly be interesting to see the results. If hue perception is affected, I would expect to see more 'mistakes' in a culture with fewer standard color names, where a 'mistake' would be associating an intermediate color with the reference color further from it in terms of wavelength. This would have to be due to associating the intermediate color and the chosen reference color in the same 'chunk.' Still, I'll admit that the confounding factors in all studies of this sort are hard to parse through as they are all so intertwined. An ideal study would examine two different language groups with highly similar cultures, environments, and lifestyles, which is a tall order to fill.

Remember what I said about interior decorators and painters? I don't have nearly the color vocabulary that either would have, yet I can take a look at a color choice palette and immediately tell that all the little squares of color are indeed different colors no matter how my vocabulary may chunk them. I can perceive the difference in color, and tell you how those two colors are different.

Man, I envy you. I can never tell the difference between all those shades of white.

The paper completely ignores the role of culture and geography in saving money. If you're not into buying a lot of stuff, then saving money is much easier. The Japanese, for instance, live on
this teeny-tiny island where space is very much at a premium, and is very resource-poor. They just don't have a lot of space to put a lot of stuff, and the stuff they do buy is expensive and so want to keep around for a good long while, so they tend to be better at saving money for that reason alone.

[Just going to define some terms here as used in the study - languages with a regularly used future tense are strong-FTR whereas languages with no or sparsely used future tense are weak-FTR.]

Yes, it does ignore all those factors, as it should. The more factors you account for in a statistical analysis, the more errors and fluctuations compound. That's not to say that we should ignore those factors, just that it's important to isolate the effects of each variable as much as possible before attempting a synthesis. The study didn't just see the effect in Japanese - it saw it in Finns, Germans, Chinese, and more. The important thing is the trend. The range of percent of households saving in countries with more weak-FTR speakers is shifted significantly higher than the range in countries with more strong-FTR speakers.

I've been thinking about this a lot. I've listened to the study's author speak on the radio, and he goes with a psychological interpretation which goes something like "people who speak languages with no future tense have lower mental distinctions between their current and future selves." I don't think it's a bad interpretation, and there could be some truth to it. On the other hand, I think I've come up with a better interpretation which also happens to be somewhat of a middle ground between our positions. Now, I don't think that current conditions in the countries with better savers explain the results very well on their own. If it turned out to be the case that countries with resource-limited conditions were correlated with higher saving, you would still be left with the question of why a disproportionate number of those countries are dominated by people speaking weak-FTR languages. If you think about how conditions were in the distant past when different groups were fighting for dominance, however, a solution emerges to fill the gaps. A weak-FTR speaker who wants to speak about the future is essentially obligated to specify a time - they can't just say "I pay you," they have to say "I pay you Wednesday" or they won't be understood. This makes holding people accountable much easier, and would therefore encourage people to make good on their plans and promises. Because of that, weak-FTR speakers would have a significant (though not overwhelming) advantage over high-FTR speakers in conditions where planning is a major factor in survival. If this is the correct interpretation, then language would be affecting behavior, but only because conditions affected language. That's all it is, though, an interpretation. If you have a different one which you think works better, I'd genuinely love to hear it.

AHAHAHAHA! Believe me, both sexes can use each other pronouns just fine. When they do use each other's pronouns, they shape others' perceptions of them, but they still understand each other just fine even with the mismatch. Using another sex's pronouns doesn't change the semantics of the sentence. This is completely unlike pronouns with proper grammatical gender, where changing the pronoun can indeed change the meaning of the sentence.

Really? The only people I see making any sort of deal about 'he/she' are the identity politics twits. I'm fine with people using gendered pronouns when talking about me, and so is everyone I know. The only real use I see for genderless pronouns are when addressing a generic person in a mixed group of people, when there is genuine ambiguity whom you might be talking to.

I'm only going to respond directly to the bottom quote because I think my response will make it clear what my position on the top one is, but let me know if you'd like clarification.

The kind of tension I'm talking about isn't about direct opposition to gender pronoun use, it's about deep deep down subconscious gear shifts that we make without even knowing it. Hubert Dreyfus is a philosopher who studies Heidegger at UC Berkeley, and I'm going to paraphrase something he said in a podcasted lecture. In Japan, rice paper walls are not an uncommon sight, and virtually everyone there will interact with them to some degree or another in their regular lives. If a Japanese person walks into a room and sees a rice paper wall, it won't stick out to them in any way, and they will simply ignore it, or, if they need to, use it without thinking about it. To a western visitor, on the other hand, a rice paper wall is going to be a relatively novel and interesting sight. They'll probably inspect it, maybe take a picture or try opening and closing it (westerners are rude fucks). Eventually, though, their attention will be drawn elsewhere. The rice paper wall, even though they can still see it, fades into the background. A few hours later they start to get tired, and going to lean on the nearest wall, which they have forgotten is made of rice paper, they crash through and fall to the ground. This is something a Japanese person would never do (unless they were very drunk), and furthermore they would never even have to remind themselves not to do it - the way to deal with rice paper walls is so deeply ingrained that they can do so without any conscious thought at all. The westerner, on the other hand, is just as well equipped to deal with solid walls without thinking, but when they did so in Japan, it led to disaster. If they had been consciously thinking "I will go to lean on this wall," then they probably would have noticed their mistake. They weren't though, the leaning was just an instantaneous reaction to being tired.

That's the kind of thinking I suspect people are doing when a conversation starts with "So I was talking to my roommate and he/she...." Whatever comes after that is automatically and unconsciously interpreted through a very different lens. This isn't inherently a bad thing - as you have pointed out, men and women are clearly different. That's why we have the words man and woman, boy and girl, male and female. But our lenses almost invariably contain falsehoods and biases, even (especially) ones we would never think consciously, just as the westerner would never consciously think to go and lean on a rice paper wall. These lenses exist for a reason, and parts of them are useful and informative. But when the second part of that sentence at the beginning of the paragraph doesn't contain anything that can be usefully interpreted in the context of gender, the only changes the lens can make to our interpretation are at best benign and at worst disastrous - we fall through the rice paper wall through no fault of our own. That's why ditching the gender pronouns seems like a potentially good idea to me. Right now it is linguistically obligatory to specify the gender of the conversational subject, even when it isn't relevant. In a language with no gender pronouns, that wouldn't happen, and people would still be able to specify when it is important (i.e. "I was talking to my roommate, who is a guy, and they said...."

There are, of course, a million different ways in which we can be induced to fall through the proverbial rice paper wall, and it's not only futile but also stupid to try and stop all of them due to the aforementioned usefulness of the mode of thought leading to it. But in this case, we just might have an opportunity to down-regulate the negative effects of one of them. Is it the most effective way for someone who wants to fight sexism to exert their energy? Almost certainly not. Could it backfire? Absolutely, and for that reason i'm only moderately in favor of it. I'm definitely an armchair quarterback on this one.

It doesn't show up in their language, but it certainly does show up elsewhere. Going as far as to commit infantacide on female babies and aborting female fetuses disproportionately is as severe as it gets.

Yes, although we have a sample size of one for how one-child policies affect infanticide rates, so while it tells us that Chinese society is sexually asymmetrical, it can't tell us if it's unusually so. Unless and until such a policy is imposed elsewhere, we won't know how the Chinese reaction compares to the way a given other country would react. Maybe Americans would go even more crazy with the baby-murdering under those conditions, we just don't have a good way to determine that sort of thing.

Which you are simply assuming.

Not at all.
1. I know that there are many different factors contributing to the state of gender relations in a given culture, such as religion and socioeconomic conditions.
2. I know that within the set of countries without gender pronouns in the primary language there is a wide degree of variation in these factors.
3. Therefore, I can predict that there will be a wide degree of variety in gender relations within the set of countries without gender pronouns in the primary language.

Again, language evolves to meet the needs of the culture that uses it. Any sort of SWH junk put forward runs right into the problem of what caused what â€" why does the language under study have the linguistic features and lexical distribution it has? The people find the language to describe what they need to describe. This I think is a very straightforward connection from the language used to the psychology.

I would argue that it's a two-way street, or maybe more accurately a roundabout. This roundabout:

Needs affect linguistic features and psychology, psychology affects linguistic features, linguistic features affect psychology, needs and psychology affect behavior, behavior affects needs, etc. I don't buy at all that usefulness in description is the only or even main factor in use and evolution of language. That's the kind of interpretation Wittgenstein fought against with his 'language games' thought experiments, and I'd strongly encourage you to read "Philosophical Investigations." Here's a passage that pretty well describes what he's trying to get you to consider in it:
"23...Review the multiplicity of language games in the following examples, and in others:
Giving orders, and obeying them--
Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements-- Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)--
Reporting an event--
Speculating about an event--
Forming or teasing a hypothesis--
Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams--
Making up a story; and reading it--
Singing catches--
Guessing riddles--
Making riddles--
Making a joke; telling it--
Solving a problem in practical arithmetic--
Translating from one language into another--
Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying."[/spoiler]
Edit: Noticed some terminological inconsistencies, went back to fix them.

[Baruch]

Some people accept the hypothesis of Benjamin Worf, and some do not.  Chomsky for example, I would expect, would reject it ... because his interest is in deep grammar which he claims is common to all languages, because all humans use the same kind of brain.  On the other hand I have read those who claim that Biblical Hebrew is radically different in thought than other languages ... because the verb comes first, whereas in Japanese the verb comes last.  And the semantic content, will vary most of all, where the cultures are most different.  Similar cultures with similar superficial grammatical structure ... will be most similar in their thinking ... so goes the deduction.