James' World 2

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I don’t think anyone really enjoys filling up the gas tank. It feels like you are just standing around when you could be getting somewhere. If you get gas on your hands or shoes, you smell like it all day. And on top of all this, you actually have to pay for it. With gas prices over $4 a gallon (up to $6 in some states), we are all too painfully aware that gas isn’t cheap.

Of course, there are many things you can do to spend less at the pump. The US Department of Energy has some tips to help you save fuel, which include removing roof cargo and the extra stuff in your trunk, using cruise control, and even turning off your engine while waiting in the drive-through line. You could also reduce how much you drive by carpooling or working from home. Finally—and this is the important one—you could just drive slower. Every car gets better gas mileage at 50 miles per hour than at 70.

But that gives us an interesting problem to solve: What commuting speed saves you the most money?

Here is the dilemma: If you drive fast, it takes more gas, which costs more money. If you drive slower, it takes less gas, so you will save money. But you will also sacrifice time—time you could spend on the clock at work, earning money. There should be some optimal driving speed at which the total cost (gasoline plus missed work) is minimized. This minimum cost will depend on the fuel efficiency of your car and how much you earn per hour.

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Photograph: Joshua Beaven/Getty Images

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I went to my neighbor’s house for something to eat yesterday.

Think about this sentence. It’s pretty simple—English speakers would know precisely what it means. But what does it actually tell you—or, more to the point, what does it not tell you? It doesn’t specify facts like the subject’s gender or the neighbor’s, or what direction the speaker traveled, or the nature of the neighbors’ relationship, or whether the food was just a cookie or a complex curry. English doesn’t require speakers to give any of that information, but if the sentence were in French, say, the gender of every person involved would be specified.

The way that different languages convey information has fascinated linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists for decades. In the 1940s, a chemical engineer called Benjamin Lee Whorf published a wildly popular paper in the MIT Technology Review that claimed the way languages express different concepts—like gender, time, and space—influenced the way its speakers thought about the world. For example, if a language didn’t have terms to denote specific times, speakers wouldn’t understand the concept of time flowing.

The Matses people speak with what seems to be great care.

This argument was later discredited, as researchers concluded that it overstated language’s constraints on our minds. But researchers later found more nuanced ways that these habits of speech can affect our thinking. Linguist Roman Jakobson described this line of investigation thus: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” In other words, the primary way language influences our minds is through what it forces us to think about—not what it prevents us from thinking about. 

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“The Discussion,” by Harry Wilson Watrous.

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