Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(That’s the adjective /lúpàjn/; the noun referring to a flower in the pea family is /lúpǝn/ — but this is not the Lupine Express.)

Francis Barlow’s illustration of the fable, 1687

Today’s morning name: the phrase the boy who cried Whorf. A paranomasic play — wolf vs. Whorf — on the boy who cried wolf, as in the Aesop fable, alluding to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on the relationship between language and thought.

Oh, I thought on coming to full consciousness, surely someone has messed Whorfianly with the formulaic phrase.

And so they had; here I’ve just picked the first one that came up in googling: the heading The boy who cried Whorf, in Anthropology for Dummies by Cameron M. Smith, p. 48.

Then I tried some other formulaic expressions (again picking just one occurrence, the first one to come before my eyes):

— Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?: my first hit here was especially nice, since I know the author: “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought” by Daniel Casasanto, in the journal Language Learning. I first encountered DC via my Stanford grad student Laura Staum (now Laura Staum Casasanto).

— keep the wolf from the door: from the Word Worry Will blog, “Keeping the Whorf from the door” by Bill Collopy on 11/2/12.

— a wolf in sheep’s clothing: “a Whorf in sheep’s clothing”, in Shared Reality: What Makes Us Strong and Tears Us Apart by E. Tory Higgins, p. 12.

No doubt there are other wolfs that have morphed into Whorfs.

This entry was posted on September 8, 2021 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Formulaic language, Language and thought, Language play, Morning names, Puns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.