I completely agree with the theory presented in this article with the evidence that Boroditsky found through her experiments. When dealing with language and how it shapes thought, most people focus too much on our own American language and how people here react to our language. Boroditsky brought in other countries and cultures to show how their understanding of language can be completely different from ours and others. For example when she talked about the bridge in France, Germans saw the bridge as having feminine features because their word for bridge is feminine. On the other hand, the French saw the bridge with masculine features because their word for bridge is a masculine one.
Language also varies across the world through things like war. How war is described in America from the news to the public can be interpreted in an opposite way in another country depending on what their words mean. This comes into great importance with things like the United Nations, when leaders of countries meet, or simply just a tourist traveling in another country. Another simple example is how you greet someone from another country. What we say and how we say it may seem normal to us, but completely rude to someone from another country. When it comes to the fashion industry, more complex names are used for colors. This makes it so that when someone looks at a shirt that seems blue at first glance, once a different name is used people can recognize the different and distinct hue in the color of the shirt and not just plain old blue.
Josh -- you're on a good track, but remember Sapir Whorf is not just about different customs; it's a hypothesis that proposes that our culture dictates the words we invent, not just differences in our words or ways of greetings. Humans invent language for their own purposes -- that's a heady concept to swallow but that's at the heart of this.
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