There is a cool article in nature.com on “Language Colors Vision.” (Actually they spell it “colours” but…)

The thing that struck me the most, though, is the green/blue square thing. If you were Korean you couldn’t differentiate between the squares of green better than the blue. Because Korean only has one color for those two. A girlfriend who grew up in Korea got in trouble with people coming by to look at her “blue used car” that she had for sale, because it was green. She has trouble telling the two colors apart, even though she also grew up speaking English.

At least that was her excuse. I don’t speak Korean so I don’t know.

But that story of hers has always given me a deeper appreciation for how language affects our learning. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I didn’t totally hate rhetoric when I was doing my PhD.