Inertia creeps

Talking about relationships between people of a different cultural background JT told me two days ago "(I don't want to be) stuck in the ever-decreasing social circles of cultural inertia." After gasping at the beauty and the precision of this sentence (hence it is a quote and not a paraphrase) I remembered how I felt the first time I had to form a meaningful relationship with someone who was from a different country than me. I came to the UK in 2001 and always thought that my English was fine. And it was, sure but it was not adequate for any deep, profound, soul-searching conversation, of the ones you do with your friends and the people you love. When you are forced to communicate emotionally in a different language, I think it is then when you actually realize the importance of language in accessing our emotions. George Orwell in 1984 talked about Newspeak, the fictional language of the new regime that would lack dangerous words like 'freedom' and 'democracy' and therefore people would not be able to think 'in those terms'. The chicken and egg problem between language and thought, debated with great liveliness in linguistics today, is a true problem and not just a theoretical riddle. Do we talk in certain words but we think abstractly in some other language of the mind or does language actually limit our thought? Was I ever aware of mind-blowing concepts of 'nondescript' and 'understatement' before I encountered these words in the English language? Did they exist in my mind, like concepts, but they were never expressed because I didn't have the words to express them, or did they form themselves, did I create a mental image of them after I first heard the words themselves?

The other issue about all this of course, has to do with the formation of meaningful relationships among people of a different cultural and linguistic background. A long time ago, when I was in Boston, one of the first people I met was this Greek guy, who was my housemate. The first time I went out for a beer with him, we spent two very enjoyable hours talking to each other. This made me think that this guy might end up being my friend. When we went home however, I though of the things we had talked about and I found that they were all easy cultural things we had in common (Greek jokes, Greek music, Greek TV shows we watched when we were kids etc). And then it hit me how much harder does one have to work to bond with people he has nothing culturally in common with. And then perhaps I thought that maybe this means that relationships with people one does not have anything cultural in common with are far more superior than relationships with people with whom you share a background with. This is of course a sweeping unfair generalization, because I do have extremely meaningful relationships with Greeks, but you have to agree that when you manage to have this level of connection with someone from a different country, it feels different, profound and important.