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Annoying Orange
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Wörter und Sachen means "Words and Things" in
German. It refers to a movement in Germany/Austria, in the early 20th
century, that insisted we use the etymology of words to study the cultural
products named by those words.
It’s also a 1959 book by Ernst Gellner* titled Words
and Things: An Examination Of, and an Attack On, Linguistic Philosophy.
The study of the language of smells requires a most astute
clarification of the words from the things, which is made most difficult by the
fact that smells are the things their
words describe. The smell of an orange is
an orange. The color of an orange is not. The color of anything is instead
white light being reflected off of a surface, the color being the portion of
that white spectrum not absorbed into
the surface. So the color of a thing is almost like the opposite of the thing.
*Gellner is a personal favorite of mine; I have many posts
on my other blog inspired by
him or in reference to another work of his, Plough,
Sword and Book (1988).
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