The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least in its strongest form (the idea that your thoughts are necessarily always expressed in concrete words of the host language

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least in its strongest form (the idea that your thoughts are necessarily always expressed in concrete words of the host language you have grown), has always been crap. Advocates for it have constantly had this back and forth of making very strong statements in support of it then sullenly backing off "oh uh I didn't mean it that way" whenever they actually get challenged on it. For instance, a definite prediction would be "Therefore, nobody -- at least nobody who is not bilingual -- has ever had, and will ever have, trouble putting their thoughts to words. Their thoughts, after all, are already in words, they just need to say the words that are already in their head." But almost everybody, monolingual or bilingual, has experienced a situation where they have had trouble putting their thoughts into words. Another definite prediction would be "Writing stuff down never aids thought directly, it only acts as an expansion of short-term memory of things that you have already put together. You had the words in your head, after all." But almost everybody reports that writing things down changes the qualitative aspects of how they think, it makes the ideas less "fuzzy" and more "concrete" to have to express them in written words. Similarly with folks who confidently state "I am an external processor" -- reporting similar "concreteness" if they speak their thoughts out loud versus trying to process them without speaking out loud. So then you get people to back off and say "well, no, I just mean that learning a new language can broaden your horizons" or so, and it's like, sure, that's fine. Famously Whorf himself was an insurance investigator who was concerned about the connection between language and thought because he noticed that people told others "this gas tank is empty" and they thought, "oh, empty, that means that it's safe to smoke around!" and caused explosions because an empty gas tank is actually full of gasoline vapor and thus is highly explosive. So Whorf's motivating example actually supports a weaker version of Sapir-Whorf which is just "when we think about something linguistically given to us, we often use linguistic shorthand categories like the one that groups 'empty' near 'safe', that might be inaccurate in our language but might not be inaccurate in some other language."