The Connecting Word ★ A video blog by SIGNEWORDS
Speaker: @Maria Rotger
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Have you ever stopped to analyze the words you use to express your emotions, both negative and positive? Do you dwell on the bad or focus on the good?

It may seem that words are just words, on our lips one second and evaporating the next, vanishing as quickly as they came. But words are powerful.

Perhaps you’ve heard the myth that Eskimos have 50 different words for snow. Anthropologist Franz Boas is often credited for postulating this theory. In reality, the moderately suggested that the Inuit and Yupik languages contain a few more words for snow than other languages, and his approach later snowballed (no pun intended) out of control, becoming a vast exaggeration. While a study performed in 2010 partially credited this theory, we now know that the number is nowhere near 50. Either way, this fact points to an exciting reality: our language is shaped by our view of the world and vice versa. As a society, we develop the vocabulary for concepts that are most relevant to us and our lifestyle and, in turn, the words we use to tint our view of reality. This is referred to as the linguistic relativity hypothesis or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

So, what do our positive and negative feelings words reflect about us? About our individual personalities? About our culture as a whole?

What’s in a name?
How can we possibly bottle up something as abstract as emotion into a word? How can we extract its essence and condense it into a single name? And, considering the full range of emotions we experience daily, how can we quantify the words we use to express positive and negative feelings? So many words, so little time. Nonetheless, researchers have taken on the daunting task of compiling a list of emotions and categorizing them.

Tiffany Watt Smith, for instance, listed 154 different worldwide human emotions. It is interesting to note that some of the feelings on the list retain names in their original language. For example, “dépaysement,” which refers to the feeling of being away from home, both good and bad, is expressed in original French. We may be tempted to think that its meaning is similar to that of the word “homesickness,” used in English, but it is uniquely distinct. Anyone who speaks more than one language can attest to the fact that sometimes there is no accurate equivalent word for a particular emotion in another language, which lends some validity to the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Language is conditioned by each society’s unique experience.

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