My wife is thinking of changing her hair style. It’s supposedly common among women to do so after breaking up with boyfriends or husbands, so I hope she’s not thinking ahead to something I don’t know about.
She wants to get bangs. Only, because she’s Australian, she doesn’t call it bangs, she calls it a fringe.
What’s interesting to me is that because Americans call it “bangs,” we speak of this thing in plural terms. Get them short. Maintain them. Comb them.
But Aussies (and the British, I assume) call it a fringe, in singular. So they say to get IT short, or maintain it.
I wonder whether thinking of things in plural or singular changes how they seem to us. Does a person think of a fringe (one unit) differently from the way a different person thinks of bangs?
There’s been a lot of stuff written about how language affects thought, with some extremists claiming that you can’t have much of one without the other (link). They say that a French speaker must think about things differently from a Swahili speaker, and not just because Swahili doesn’t have a word for…picante, let’s say. It’s more because of the way that nouns, verbs, and the rest work together.
I wonder whether that could be true about individual words and phrases within the same language. Do regionalisms lead to different ways of thinking?
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Once, when I was young and impressionable, I let a hair dresser give me what he called a “flirt,” which is a quarter of a set of bangs that kind of sits to the side of your forehead very unattractively (despite the attractive name). It was one in a long string of bad haircuts.
I bet it was cute.