And as biologists worry about diminishing biodiversity so cultural scientists worry about the abatement of cultural diversity. Cross-culturally, people's orientations to time, space, self and other vary considerably because of the languages they speak. It sort of coils in your mind, that sort of thing, and dictates something to you. A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around. The key assumption of symbolic interactionists is that people act toward objects and others on the basis of their meanings.
Meaning is symbolic and symbolic orders are fragile systems.
Change the symbolic and one not only distorts but even destroys the meaning referent, as when one repeats a word over and over again. In addition, these meanings reside within the relations among things and the distinctions they make. Finally, according to those from the Durkheimian tradition, these perceived relations among things are ultimately determined by the relations among people. In The Fine Line , Eviatar Zerubavel develops how language allows us to detach mental entities from their surroundings and to assign them fixed, decontextualized meanings. Such detachments, the deriving of categories of things, involves making discreteness out of continuums.