ABSTRACT
Words have a potency that is underestimated – even ignored – by many. Words shape our understanding and our perception of events; words are nuanced and subtle and immensely powerful. That power has been well expressed by the evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel in his TEDTalk video, ‘How Language Transformed Humanity’:
Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It’s a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people’s minds. I’m talking about your language, of course, because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else’s mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery. Instead, when you speak, you’re actually using a form
of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television. It’s just that, whereas that device relies on pulses of infrared light, your language relies on pulses, discrete pulses, of sound.1
