A New Word

I learnt the word "isogloss" on Friday. It is an imaginary line on a map which distinguishes between two different uses for the same word. The Atlantic Ocean (or even "the pond") is a huge isogloss. We wear our boots and bonnets, they pop them (meaning trunk and hood of a car repectively). We fish in our ponds. Over there to "knock somebody up" is to wake them up from sleeping. A more local example: those in Eastern Wisconsin almost universally use the word "water fountain" to describe a fountain from which you drink from. Those in Western Wisconsin (and Minnesota, I can attest) use the word "water fountain" to mean an outdoor statue which spurts water. Of course we understand the usage of the two words, but, at least using my class as evidence, it's an actual phenomenon. I also learned that the folks in Eastern Wisconsin call outdoor watery statues "bubblers".

Which brings me to another thing I learnt: the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis says that you are only as smart as the words you know (anyone else find my crude definition ironic? I digress). As an example, if the theory holds true, not having a word for the color yellow would make you unable to comprehend yellowness. Of course you'd see the same banana that everybody else saw, but you'd have to call the color something else. Thus, your ability to distinguish between colors would be far less than somebody who spoke another language, because you'd never distinguish between yellow and orange. Perhaps this is a better example: in English you can feel frustrated, perturbed, agitated, exasperated, infuriated, wrathfull, uncontrolled and impassioned, but if the only word you know is "mad", you have no way of expressing your feeling with any more certainty. Perhaps you will struggle to describe your exact feeling with words you know, but likely you never figured there were any different types of mad, and you're content to just call yourself mad.

Am I portraying my Minnesotan ethnocentrism when I say that the Eastern Wisconsinites and their word "bubbler" says something about their intellect?