Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, listener mail.

This is Robert Lam.

And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's the first listener mail of the new year.

It's 2022 and the mailbag overflow it.

We have a lot of messages to catch up on.

So some of these will go back a little bit into December, but that's what we got to do.

Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

Okay, I think maybe I'm going to start with a message from Tom.

This was in response to the couple of episodes we did about the history of time travel thought.

And so a refresher on what Tom brings up in particular in these episodes.

We talked about how languages generally conceptualize time using metaphors based on space.

So we talk about time like it's a type of space.

You know, you arrive at home or you can arrive at 415.

And how for English and many other modern languages, we picture that time, that space

like time with the future situated in front of us in the past behind us.

And in part two of that episode, we discussed one previous piece of listener mail where

somebody got in touch to say that this spatial orientation is reversed for Cantonese speakers

that for Cantonese speakers, the future is behind you and the past is in front.

And so Tom picks up on this by saying, hi guys, I just finished listening to Time Traveler

Zero part two.

The Cantonese example of a reversed spatial metaphor for time orientation reminded me of something

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