I’m hardly the first to take notice of this (at least 370,000 others have beat me to the punch), but I promise you I am one of the few to actually listen to the radio show before ever seeing this accompanying video. I will explain it all in a moment, but first behold: Possibly the best short film I have ever seen on YouTube. Its title: “Words:”

This was created in conjunction with an episode of the WNYC radio series Radiolab – a thoroughly brilliant populist-academic look at the world of science. One recent episode was called “Words” (listen to the full episode), and it featured stories about how the knowledge of vocabulary, and comprehension of the spoken word, can literally change the way we look at the world. There’s a tale of a man who never knew language, and upon realizing that different words (“table,” “clock”) referred to different objects, burst into tears. There are the scientists who show that it’s late in childhood, well past the age of five, when humans start to use words to decipher spaces and distances. Hence, before that age, our language, and worldview, is far inferior.