Aesthetic Connections on NPR

Today while driving to work, I heard an interview with Lera Boroditsky, a Stanford teacher who is researching gender-language connections. She has noticed through her studies that languages which have masculine or feminine nouns carry these genders over into the adjectives used when describing these objects. For example, German speakers consider bridges feminine and when asked to offer adjectives to describe a bridge, they used words like "delicate," "beautiful," et c. However, Spanish speakers who consider bridges masculine, use words like "strong," "long," et c.
In other words, Boroditsky claims that language affects the aesthetic experience.

After testing out Shakespeare's line "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," Boroditsky found Shakespeare wrong. Roses in paper bags labeled "mowed grass" did not smell as sweet as those labeled "rose" to her test subjects.

Of course, this reminded me of Williams.