New Year has arrived, or have we arrived at New Year?

While both statements convey the same idea, they're viewed from two different perspectives on time.

On the one hand, we may think of events as things that are on the move heading toward us.

Holidays are coming is a classic example of the moving time perspective.

Time is seen as an unstoppable train

hurtling toward us from the future and into the past.

On the other hand, we might imagine ourselves as being on the move through time as in we've arrived at the moment of truth

This is called the moving ego perspective here time is seen as a path for us to move along into the future.

While these perspectives differ, they both see the past lying behind us,

the present as the place we are, and the future as ahead of us.

But does our perspective on time simply boil down to a matter of preference, or are other

factors also at play?

Grammar Girl here, I'm Nyan Fog Fog Fog Fog Fog

and stick around because after we reflect on the language of time in this segment by Sarah Duffy,

we'll talk about why commas are like people on the subway.

Although many languages across the globe picture the future as in front of us and the

past as behind us, there are some notable exceptions.

The Yupno community of Papua New Guinea, for example, point downhill toward the mouth of the

river when talking about the past, and up the mountain to the source of the river when discussing the future.

An expression like a few years ago, Omeropom-Bilak roughly translates as down there other side year.

In other languages, people's perspectives on time differ radically from the way they speak about time.

That is, there are disassociations between the two. A case in point is Darizha, a Moroccan

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