Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf contended that language determines the way we think. According to Whorf s (1956) linguistic relativity hy­pothesis, different languages impose different conceptions of reality: "Language itself shapes a man's basic ideas."

Whorf s idea seldom occurs to people who speak a single lan­guage. To them, language seems only a vehicle for thought. But to those who speak two dissimilar languages, such as English and Japa­nese, it seems obvious that one thinks differently in different languages.

Some examples: English has only one word for snow, whereas the Eskimo language has a variety of terms that denote various conditions of snow and ice. This, said Whorf, allows the Eskimos to perceive differ­ences in snow that would go unnoticed by people who speak English. The link can also be seen at the level of grammar. The Hopi, for in­stance, have no past tense for their verbs. Therefore, Whorf con­tended, the Hopi cannot so readily think about the past.

Critics of the idea that language determines thought claim that words reflect rather than create the way we think. The Eskimos' very lives depend on their ability to recognize different conditions of snow and ice, so they need different words for these conditions (as skiers do, using such terms as "sticky snow" or "powder" to describe the slopes). Just because you lack the Eskimos' rich vocabulary for describ­ing snow does not mean that you are incapable of perceiving these differences. Likewise, people who lack our words for shapes and col­ors nevertheless seem to perceive them as we do.

Although it is therefore too strong to say that language determines the way we think, our words may influence what we think. We therefore do well to choose our words carefully. When people refer to women as "girls" – as in "the girls at the office" – it perpetuates a view of women's lower status, does it not? Or consider the generic pronoun "he." Does it make any difference whether I write "A child learns language as he interacts with his caregivers" or "Chil­dren learn language as they interact with their caregivers"? Some argue that it makes no difference because every reader knows that "the mas­culine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females" (as the British Parliament declared in 1850).

But is the generic "he" always taken to include females? Several researchers have concluded that it is not. Janet Hyde (1984), for exam­ple, reached this conclusion after she asked children to finish stories for which they were given a first line such as, "When a kid goes to school, often feels excited on the first day. " When she filled in the blank with the pronoun "he" the children's stories were nearly always males, whereas ''he or she" in the blank resulted in female characters about one-third of the time. Studies with adults have found similar effects of the ge­neric "he." Sentences about "the artist and his work" tend to conjure up images of a man.

In addition, people tend to use the generic pronouns selectively, as in "the doctor . . . he" and "the secretary . . . she". If the generic masculine pronouns were truly gender-free, it should not startle us to hear that "a nurse must answer his calls" or that "man, like other mammals, nurses his young." That we are startled indicates that the "his" carries a gender connotation that clashes with our idea of "nurse." The power of language to influence thinking is one reason why vocabulary building is such a crucial part of education. To expand lan­guage is to expand the ability to think. David Premack reported that even among chimpanzees, language training enhances the ability to think abstractly and to reason by analogy. For example, shown a cylinder half filled with water, a chimp not trained in language had difficulty recognizing that half an apple was more like the half-filled cylinder than three-fourths of an apple. But if language-trained, chimps could more readily grasp the analogy. In young children, too, thinking develops hand in hand with language. What is true for chimpanzees and preschoolers is true for every­one: It pays to increase your word power. This is the reason why most textbooks, including this one, introduce new words to teach new ideas and new ways of thinking.