What Got me Fascinated with Language

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To understand reality, which is to be able to simulate others more accurately and have thoughts that more truthfully describe their experience, as individuals and imagined groups, we need to think about the substrate of thinking. It is not that clear what that is. It seems that a more basic layer of thinking exists underneath our inner voice. Some scholars call it mentalese. Does the language we use, the way words are defined, the rules and the structure affect our innermost thoughts, or are they mere symbolic representations of it?

I became fascinated with language as a child, listening to the way OSHO plays with words, redefines them, infuses his agenda into them, rephrasing their meanings. Here are some examples:

!The world consists of verbs, not nouns

I hate grammar. Learning the nonsense of Hebrew grammar for years, without the teaching ever connecting it to anything real, practical, to the fundamentals of our thinking, is such a "crime against the mind". As a child, I always felt language is an important substrate through which we create a worldview, and no one seems to talk about the deep ways it affects us and the deep agenda entrenched in it. I was puzzled by the fact that, when language is concerned, the focus was always on nonsense. To this day, I have a lot of spelling "mistakes". I wish all my mistakes in life were as dramatic as those ones.
As an animal advocate I was perplexed by the language my colleagues use: I wondered why advocates are saying the meat industry is "bad for the environment" or "causing deforestation" instead of saying "the slaughter industry is killing wild monkeys and snails and birds", or "it is a leading cause for wild animal extermination". Why hide the sentient and highlight the insentient. Why don't we have a term to define this monumental crime I call wild animal Genocide.

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