It turns out, someone had dumped 45 metric tons of lodestone at Coonskin Park, skewing all the compasses in the area. They broke up the lodestone and shipped it to North Carolina, and lo and behold, all the compasses started working again. Changing the sign was too costly after paying to move the lodestone.

The strong version of the Sapir Worf hypothesis is insane because in academia, people are constantly inventing words (or specifying a definition of a common word) for their specific usage.

If a lack of a word really meant my culture was unable to conceive of that concept, then I think the theory would need to describe how and why the invention of new words happens. We didn’t have a word for prime numbers until we did. We didn’t have a word for capitalism until we did.