the problem with the idea that language affects thought is not that it’s entirely wrong but that there are many ways in which language can affect thought, and people tend to blur them together. In particular, people tend to confuse banal observations, such as that one person’s words can affect another person’s thoughts (if that weren’t true, language as a whole would be useless) with radical claims, such as that we think in our native language, and that the language we speak makes it impossible to think certain thoughts.
