The problem is this worldview business. None of the evidence suggests, as we are so often told, that speakers of these languages are walking around on different acid trips than the rest of us. Here are three quick reasons why.

1. Telegraphic Languages. Some languages are more telegraphic than others. For an English speaker, to a large extent, learning Mandarin is a matter of learning how much is unnecessary to still communicate effectively. No articles. No way to express the past tense. It’s quite common not to mark things as plural. The first words of the Bible can be rendered as “Start-start God achieve-make sky-earth.” If we are to suppose that this aspect of Mandarin creates a “worldview”—if two blues means Russians see more blue—then can’t we assume that the Chinese aren’t seeing, well, as much as we are? To be sure, no one has said that languages force us to think only in a certain way, just that they make certain ways more likely. But even then, Whorfianism forces us to say to a Chinese speaker that they are a bit of—just a bit of, but still—a dummy.

At this point, we are inclined to decide that how a language works can’t have any significant effect on thought—but then, why are we suddenly inclined otherwise when it’s about seeing blue more vividly or being more attuned to the difference between sticks and round things? A certain incoherence looms with this kind of thinking, in which things are easily turned on their heads, according to how good the proposition happens to make us feel. Economist Keith Chen has recently ventured an idea that the Chinese language’s telegraphic quality makes its speakers think more about the things its language doesn’t mark. His thesis is that Chinese, because it lacks a future marker like will, makes the Chinese save more money, and it has been eaten up with a spoon. Any coherent notion of how language corresponds with worldview has become distinctly elusive here.

2. What About Us? What precisely is the “worldview” from speaking English? What do Mary Tyler Moore, William Jennings Bryan, Harriet Tubman, Helen Mirren, Paul Hogan, me, and Sting have in common that we would call a “worldview”? The question sheds light on the notion of any one language—as opposed to a culture—encoding a “worldview.” It would seem that those people have, or had, quite distinct worldviews, based on their different—wait for it—cultures. The idea that speaking English has given those seven people anything we would call a common “worldview” seems faintly absurd—and leaves it hard to uphold the idea of any other language embodying one.

3. When the “ Worldview” Looks Unpleasant. There are many languages in New Guinea and Australia in which there is one word that means eat, drink, and smoke. Are we to designate these people as less attuned to gustatory pleasures than us? They give little evidence of it, and note how distasteful it feels to even suggest it. Or, Swedish and Danish have no single word for what we call wiping. You can rub, erase, and such, and the word they spontaneously give as a translation means dry—but there is no word that means, specifically, what we mean by to wipe. Yet we shall neither tell Scandinavians that they do not wipe nor even imply that the act is less vividly important to them than to the rest of us.