Umwelt

Umwelt: this word deserves to be in more common use. It means "the world as it is experienced by a particular organism".

It comes from zoology, specifically ethology, I found it in this book on dog behaviour. Umwelt has the sense that a dog's, or any organism's, experience of the world is bounded by its range of perception. This range of perception forms a bubble the animal lives within. This perceptual bubble in turn limits (and distorts) the range of emotion and action the organism is capable of.

Human experience is equally circumscribed by perceptual bubbles (except that the more interesting perceptual bubbles are cognitive, or maybe maybe linguistic, rather than sensory). We need a word for those bubbles. Let umwelt be that word.

Let umwelt takes its rightful place in the English lexicon, alongside gestalt, zeitgeist, schadenfreude and cousin weltanschauung.

The wind beneath my wings does NOT make me fly high

Bette Midler singing "Wind beneath my wings"

Actually, it's the wind above my wings that makes me fly.

Air flows faster over the upper surface of the wing, which lowers pressure, and therefore provides lift and enables flight. The mechanics are the same for a airplane wing, a frisbee, a sail, a swinging cricket ball or an eagle's wing. Similarly, the spoiler blades at the back of F1 racing cars are designed so the wind passes beneath the wings. This pulls the car down towards the tarmac, and provides stability.

This science is complex enough to provide many engineers with a lifetime of work, but is neither new nor controversial. It follows from Bernoulli's principle, which I was taught in 8th class by Kanaka Eshwaran-Miss (aka Kinetic Energy-miss).

So why does Bette Midler keep showing up on Muzak tracks around the world singing:

"I can fly higher than an eagle,
'cause you are the wind beneath my wings"?

Wrong! The wind above her wings makes her fly high. The wind beneath her wings brings her down to earth. Ignoramus. Fancy dress Fatima! Bougainvillea! Pithecanthropus! Odd-toed ungulate!! Nit-witted ninepin! Squawking popinjay!

F1 car, that uses wind beneath the wings to stay low

Airplane, that uses wind above the wings to fly high

PS: I'm kidding. It's fun to win an argument conclusively in an age of "it depends".