Nearly 100 years ago, a US fire-safety inspector called Benjamin Lee Whorf noticed something odd about the way factory workers handled oil drums.
The workers had been trained never to smoke near the drums to prevent explosions, yet accidents kept on happening and the engineers couldn’t work out why. But Whorf, who was not just a trained engineer but also an amateur anthropologist, had observed, without preconceptions, how the workers behaved in their everyday habitat. Eventually, he realised that while they were very careful around oil drums marked “full”, they kept on smoking around those drums marked “empty”.
From a scientific point of view, this was crazy, since even empty oil drums contain fumes that can ignite. The problem was cultural: the word “empty” in western culture is usually associated with things that are boring and unimportant. Thus the empty drums were all too easy to ignore, along with the risks. As Whorf wrote in his seminal 1939 paper The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language: “Around a storage of what are called ‘gasoline drums’ . . . great care will be exercised; while around a storage of what are called ‘empty gasoline drums’ it will tend to be different — careless, with little repression of smoking or of tossing cigarette stubs about . . . Physically the situation is hazardous, but the linguistic analysis . . . must employ the word ‘empty’, which inevitably suggests lack of hazard.”