Penny:

I think your folk are the ones to whom we owe the Great Korzybskian Debt -- the people who built a map that was so clever you could defend confusing it for the territory. Only the English, and later the 'Murricans, could claim to have possession of a symbol-set so profound, complex and multi-hued as to be replacement for reality itself!!

Of course this laid them open to all kinds of charges of intransigent arrogance and hubris, but the truth is they were simply swelled up with the cleverness of inventing a language that could get close!!

And folks have been striking out against whitey ever since. especially whiteys like your revered self who seek to perpetuate the myth of matching maps to ground truth. The fact is you never did it, and you never came close, and it is all a silly gaseous vanity on your part. But believing it made it possible to overwhelm the Malay, the Hindu, the Buddhist and the Turk!

A