Once again, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis enters into a philosophical discussion and several frantic questions are raised: Are our thoughts determined by language or are they simply influenced by language? Does our language limit our world to such an extent that our ethics are determined by the way we speak? Is Orwell's Newspeak a real danger? Is political correctness feasible? Whorf means yes, “all higher levels of thought depend on language” (Cordova, 78). But many linguists, while supporting the idea that our thinking is influenced by language, continue to argue about how much this is so. There is still a lot of disagreement about what is actually being discussed and what the consequences are. Since we are not linguists, this article will not reach any conclusions or make any points, but will wind its way through anecdotal evidence in an attempt to demonstrate that the question is without an easy answer. First, an anecdote. I took a linguistics class a while back and the professor told a story he had heard from a fellow linguist who was studying an Uto-Aztec language. This linguist said that one of the Indians she worked with had told her privately that "white people lie all the time." When he asked this man what he meant, he said that a white man he was driving with said, “Oh, I see John is home,” after seeing John's pickup truck parked outside his house. The native told the linguist that the white man had not seen John in person, so why was he saying he knew John was home? He must have lied. Is the Indian stupid? No, he simply took "see" literally and assumed the white man was lying because John wasn't there. This simple misunderstanding proves that the Indian man has not understood the metaphor we constantly use... half of the paper... is politically correct: we use politically correct language to show that we have changed paradigm, not as a catalyst for change. In other words, my use of language tells me little about how to be ethical. Don't weigh my options; reflects my prejudices. I can use my language to support my ethical stance, not to change it. It therefore remains more important to look at the cultural structure (the matrix) of people's actions rather than the language they speak. Works Cited Cordova, VF How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of VF Cordova. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.Goddard, Cliff. “Whorf meets Wierzbicka: Variation and universals in language and thought.” Language sciences 25 (2003): 393-432.