Beauty Is A Verb
Sep. 1st, 2010 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
christinathenaOr rather, it should be.
In the English language - as in the admittedly limited selection of other languages I've seen - beauty is described with an adjective, "She's beautiful", "That's a beautiful sunset", etc. It is described as a property of the person or thing perceived as beautiful. But, to paraphrase the old cliche, beauty is in the cerebral cortex of the beholder. It is not an intrinsic property of people or things, it is an emotional response of the viewer. So, logically speaking, it should be described with a verb. "I beauty her", "I beauty that sunset". I.e., "I perceive her as beautiful", "I perceive that sunset as beautiful". If there's anything to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - and there's good reason to believe that it has at least some truth - this would tend to reduce the association between beauty (a response of the viewer) with value (a property of the person or thing)
In the English language - as in the admittedly limited selection of other languages I've seen - beauty is described with an adjective, "She's beautiful", "That's a beautiful sunset", etc. It is described as a property of the person or thing perceived as beautiful. But, to paraphrase the old cliche, beauty is in the cerebral cortex of the beholder. It is not an intrinsic property of people or things, it is an emotional response of the viewer. So, logically speaking, it should be described with a verb. "I beauty her", "I beauty that sunset". I.e., "I perceive her as beautiful", "I perceive that sunset as beautiful". If there's anything to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - and there's good reason to believe that it has at least some truth - this would tend to reduce the association between beauty (a response of the viewer) with value (a property of the person or thing)
