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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9614524" data-attributes="member: 6790260">And it doesn't even require science. Art has been creating concepts which have no physical referent since before we had written language. We invented a Jabberwock to tell silly mock-ballads about; we know what it looks like even. Yet it isn't real.You also have things like when math comes up with a "pure math" concept...that we then later realize has incredibly useful practical applications, e.g. non-Euclidean geometry (needed for relativity and the distortion of spacetime), quaternions (used for 3D rotations and rendering, incredibly important for modern gaming), and even conic sections (the height of Greek pure mathematics, until we learned that they describe trajectories!) Occasionally the flow even goes the other way: the theory of distributions arose because Paul Dirac needed a "function" which had ridiculous BS properties and he just said "well, I'm gonna pretend such a function exists", and mathematicians said, "Well that's not cricket at all!" and went to make the Dirac delta "function" actually rigorous.Effectively, Max is arguing a form of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is widely discredited and never actually said by either Sapir or Whorf. People invent new words all the time. Some of them survive. Others don't. The ones that survive long enough qualify for getting recorded in dictionaries.</blockquote>