Hannah Zulueta Daily Dog Food Recipes · Perspective
The words you have decide what you can see
How language shapes reality, and why Chinese Medicine hands you a better vocabulary for your own body.
I first heard Lera Boroditsky on Trevor Noah’s show, the one he publishes on YouTube. She is such an eloquent speaker, and something she said opened a door in my head I had not known was there, so I went looking for more. Every example in the first half of this article comes from her lecture, embedded below and worth your time. What she found in the lab is the same thing I watch in the treatment room every week, and I still cannot stop thinking about the color blue.
A word is a lens, and the lens comes first.
You cannot reliably notice a difference you have no word for. That is Boroditsky’s finding across colors, time, and blame. It is also the reason Chinese Medicine asks so many questions about something as ordinary as loose stool. The questions are the vocabulary. Once you have the vocabulary, you can see what is happening in the body, and once you can see it, you can reach for the remedy that fits it.
Two blues
In English, every shade of blue is blue. The sky, the sea, a pair of jeans: one word, with adjectives bolted on when we need them. Russian has no single word for blue. Light blue is goluboy and dark blue is siniy, and a Russian speaker has to choose between them every time, the way an English speaker has to choose between red and pink.
Same stretch of color. One language draws a line through the middle of it and makes its speakers cross that line out loud.
Jonathan Winawer and colleagues tested this in 2007. Russian speakers were faster at telling apart two blues that fell on either side of their goluboy and siniy line than two blues that fell on the same side. English speakers showed no such advantage. The boundary in the language had become a boundary in perception. Russian speakers practice that distinction every time they open their mouths, and practice sharpens the eye.
Practice a distinction long enough and your eyes start to make it for you.
The moon is a man. The moon is a woman.
In German the moon is masculine, der Mond. In Spanish it is feminine, la luna. Nothing about the moon changed. The grammar did, and grammar arrives with expectations attached.
One bridge, described by speakers of two languages. Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips (2003).
Boroditsky and her colleagues asked German and Spanish speakers to describe a bridge. Bridge is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers reached for beautiful, elegant, and slender. Spanish speakers reached for strong, sturdy, and towering. Same bridge. The gender assigned by the grammar had quietly shaped what people noticed about it.
How long ago did you read it?
Ask an English speaker whether they read a book and the past tense does one job: it happened before now. Some languages refuse to leave it there. Yagua, spoken in the Peruvian Amazon, has five past tenses, graded by distance. Whether you finished the book an hour ago, earlier today, a few days back, some months ago, or long ago changes the verb you are allowed to use.
One past tense against five. A Yagua speaker cannot report the past without placing it.
The verb forces the speaker to keep track of something an English speaker is free to blur. That is what a grammar does. It decides what you have to pay attention to in order to open your mouth at all.
Where is the past?
In English the future is ahead of us and the past is behind. We look forward to a holiday and put a bad year behind us. The Aymara, in the Andes, gesture the other way. The past is in front, where it can be seen. The future is behind, where it cannot. When Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser filmed Aymara speakers talking, their hands pointed forward for last year and back over the shoulder for what was still to come.
Núñez and Sweetser (2006). Speech and gesture agree: for the Aymara, what is known sits in front of the eyes.
The Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal community in Australia that Boroditsky has worked with, go further. They have no words for left and right. Everything is north, south, east, or west, down to “there is an ant on your southwest leg.” To speak at all, you have to know which way you are facing, so they always do. Hand them a set of pictures showing time passing and they will lay it out east to west, whichever way they happen to be sitting.
Who broke the arm?
In American English we say “I broke my arm.” In many languages that sentence would sound unhinged. Nobody goes out and deliberately breaks their arm. Their arm breaks. Spanish and Japanese speakers reach for the accidental form, closer to “the arm broke itself on me,” and save the agent for things a person meant to do.
Caitlin Fausey and Boroditsky showed English, Spanish, and Japanese speakers short videos of small accidents: a vase knocked off a table, a balloon popped. Afterward, English speakers were better at remembering who did it, even when it was plainly an accident. Spanish and Japanese speakers remembered the accident and let the person go. Their language had never asked them to hold onto the agent, so they did not.
A vase and a balloon are small stakes. The grammar does the same work when the event is serious, and the effect is easier to see.
Same event, three sentences. In 2006 Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot his hunting partner, Harry Whittington. Tap each version.
The agent is the whole sentence.
A person, a verb, a victim. Readers who get this version assign the most blame. There is nowhere else in the sentence for the blame to go.
The shooter has left the room.
Something happened to Whittington. Who did it has been removed from the grammar, and readers assign less blame without being told to.
Each link a step further from the man.
Cheney’s own account described pulling a trigger, which fired a round, which hit Harry. Every clause puts one more object between the man and the wound. Boroditsky used this example because it is the agentive frame being dismantled in real time, by the agent.
Fausey and Boroditsky then gave people two accounts of the same accident, one agentive and one not, and asked them to judge it. The agentive version drew more blame and higher financial penalties. Nothing about the event was different. The wording moved the verdict.
The sentence you use to describe an event is already a verdict on it.
Not every linguist accepts this. Noam Chomsky’s school argues that the deep structure of thought is shared by all humans and that language mostly translates it. The evidence Boroditsky and her colleagues keep gathering says the translation is anything but neutral.
Now bring this to the body.
“I have diarrhea.” In Western medicine that sentence means one thing. It either resolves on its own, or it becomes a stool test, a microbiome panel, a prescription. In Chinese Medicine the sentence is where the conversation starts, because Chinese Medicine is a language, and it has more words for what your body is doing than you have been given.
Chinese Medicine sees an event happening in a body, and it wants to know the shape of the event. You are the place where the event is happening.
What does the diarrhea look like?
Here is what I ask, and I ask it of a person and of a dog’s owner in nearly the same words.
Is it wet and watery, like it ran straight through?
Is it soft like pudding? Is it mixed, formed at the start and explosive at the end? Does it carry undigested food? Is the odor stronger than usual, or oddly absent? Each answer is a different word in this language, and each word points somewhere different.
What time of day does it come?
Before dawn, on waking, is one pattern. An hour after a meal is another. A bad day that tracks with stress, travel, or a fight in the house is a third. The clock is part of the vocabulary.
What neighborhood does this pattern live in?
Are its friends making you thirsty, or is there no thirst at all? Is the appetite roaring or gone? Is the belly cold or hot to the touch? In a person, is the tongue pale, red, or coated yellow? In a dog I read the same neighborhood through the ears, the skin, the coat, and the appetite.
The symptom is the center. The pattern is the neighborhood around it.
Would you believe that there is a different herb and a different way of feeding for each of these constellations? Watery stool at dawn with no thirst and undigested food is a cold, tired digestion. It wants warm, cooked, simple food and warming herbs. Explosive, foul, burning stool with thirst and a yellow coated tongue is damp heat. It wants cooling, draining herbs and lighter meals. Stool that swings between formed and loose with every stressful week is a Liver pushing on a Spleen, and it wants something that moves and soothes. One word in English. Three different bodies in Chinese Medicine, and three different remedies.
When you can see with clarity, you can reach for the remedy that fits.
Handing you the words
Knowing this as a practitioner is something we are trained into. The job is to explain it to the patient with such clarity that they can use it themselves: to give you the vocabulary to report what is happening, and the lens to read how the body changes, so you can adjust in real time instead of waiting for the next appointment to tell you what you already saw.
This is why the plans I write for a dog say “watch whether he is running hotter or damper this week” rather than “give this for six weeks.” An owner who can tell dark, thick ear discharge from thin, pale ear discharge is watching heat turn into damp with her own eyes. She has the words for it now, so she can see it, and because she can see it, she can tell me the day it changes.
Lonny Jarrett, whose work I am studying, describes the practitioner’s role as reframing: holding up a different account of what is happening so that a person can stop identifying with the illness and start working with it, waking up to the pattern and growing past it.
Working from the pattern
In Chinese Medicine the unit of attention is the pattern. A diagnosis names a disease and hands it to you to carry. A pattern describes what the body is doing right now, and what the body is doing right now can change. There is far more room to act inside a pattern than inside a diagnosis, and far more of that room belongs to you.
I see people who never let go of an illness. It becomes the name they answer to. On a spiritual level, waking up to that is one step. Growing from it is a second and harder one, and the second does not happen without the first.
So when you work with me on your dog’s condition, I will use language that keeps your attention on what you can see and measure with your own eyes and senses: the stool, the ears, the coat, the appetite, the timing. The diagnosis stays important in your work with your veterinarian, and I do not ignore it. In TCM Dietetics we speak the language that belongs to this system, because that is the language that shows you what to do next.
Hear her explain it
This is the lecture the first half of this article is drawn from. The blues, the bridge, the Kuuk Thaayorre, the Aymara, and the hunting accident are all hers, told by the person who ran the studies.
Lera Boroditsky, “How language shapes the way we think,” TED, 2018.
The body is always talking
Every sign and symptom is the body speaking. With the right language, we can hear what it is saying and reconnect it to what it is already able to do. That is my goal: to restore access to the body’s own resources.
I start from the pattern, and my stance is that the body is infinitely wise in how it presents. It is always doing what it believes is correct in the moment. My job is to guide it back to the best version of itself, and in TCM Dietetics that begins with the shape of the stool, the timing, the neighborhood it lives in, and food and herbs matched to that picture.
For people, the same conversation happens at Satori Acupuncture and Herbs in San Diego.
References
Boroditsky, L. (2001). Does language shape thought? Mandarin and English speakers’ conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.2001.0748
Boroditsky, L. (2018, May). How language shapes the way we think [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I64RtGofPW8
Boroditsky, L., & Gaby, A. (2010). Remembrances of times East: Absolute spatial representations of time in an Australian Aboriginal community. Psychological Science, 21(11), 1635-1639. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610386621
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L. A., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, syntax, and semantics. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 61-79). MIT Press.
Fausey, C. M., & Boroditsky, L. (2010). Subtle linguistic cues influence perceived blame and financial liability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17(5), 644-650. https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.17.5.644
Fausey, C. M., Long, B. L., Inamori, A., & Boroditsky, L. (2010). Constructing agency: The role of language. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, Article 162. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00162
Jarrett, L. S. (1998). Nourishing destiny: The inner tradition of Chinese medicine. Spirit Path Press.
Núñez, R. E., & Sweetser, E. (2006). With the future behind them: Convergent evidence from Aymara language and gesture in the crosslinguistic comparison of spatial construals of time. Cognitive Science, 30(3), 401-450. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0000_62
Payne, D. L., & Payne, T. E. (1990). Yagua. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (Eds.), Handbook of Amazonian languages (Vol. 2, pp. 249-474). Mouton de Gruyter.
Sapir, E. (1929). The status of linguistics as a science. Language, 5(4), 207-214.
Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (J. B. Carroll, Ed.). MIT Press.
Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A. R., & Boroditsky, L. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(19), 7780-7785. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0701644104
The diagrams on this page are original illustrations of the findings above, drawn for this article.
Hannah Zulueta obtained her Certificate in Canine Nutrition from CASI Institute. She is also studying for her Doctorate in Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Herbalism from the esteemed Pacific College of Health and Medicine. If you’re as keenly interested in health for yourself, visit her website for human health: Satori Acupuncture and Herbs.
She resides in San Diego with her three dogs, Maggie, Orbit, and Mr. Higgins.
She is available for one on one consultations. She develops evidence-based recipes that meet both NRC and AAFCO nutritional standards while integrating the therapeutic food principles of Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine into her formulations.
Additionally, you can find her sharing free content on Instagram.
