{"id":308,"date":"2008-02-13T10:17:06","date_gmt":"2008-02-13T15:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=308"},"modified":"2008-02-13T10:17:06","modified_gmt":"2008-02-13T15:17:06","slug":"surrey-with-the-bangs-on-top","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=308","title":{"rendered":"Surrey with the Bangs on Top"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

She wants to get bangs. Only, because she’s Australian, she doesn’t call it bangs, she calls it a fringe.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But Aussies (and the British, I assume) call it a fringe, in singular. So they say to get IT short, or maintain it.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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<\/a>). 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.<\/p>\n

I wonder whether that could be true about individual words and phrases within the same language. Do regionalisms lead to different ways of thinking?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-languagelit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}