TURKEY: Like Wittgenstein, Sukru Haluk Akalin thinks the limits of your language are the limits of your world. Head of the Turkish Language Institute, Turkey's language watchdog, he has just announced plans to ban sexist expressions from a dictionary of proverbs due to be published soon.
"Women are society's most valuable individuals," Prof Akalin says. "By excluding expressions that demean them, we are showing young people the way."
Unsurprisingly, in a country where men still very much have the upper hand, a fair few phrases risk the cut. There's "long hair, short on brains", for instance, or "a father who doesn't beat his daughter will beat his knees". At a time when the Turkish media is heavily involved in campaigns to reduce domestic violence and increase school attendance rates for girls, Prof Akalin was probably expecting a sympathetic hearing. He didn't get it.
"Can you cure cancer by excising the word from medical text books?" asks Hakki Devrim, a doyen of Turkish journalism who's been writing about language for decades.
"The institute's plan is laughable and appalling, in equal measure."
For Emre Akoz, in the mass circulation daily Sabah, it is "vandalism", akin to tearing up a mosaic because it portrays a man with a big penis.
Above all, though, it is very characteristic of a body that played a central role in arguably the most sweeping changes in Turkey's history - the language reforms of the 1920s and 30s.
When Turkey was founded in 1923 out of the ashes of the Ottoman empire, the language spoken by the urban elites was a sophisticated mishmash of Turkish, Persian and Arabic.
This wasn't at all to the liking of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, nation-builder and nationalist, and he set about purging it radically.
For years after the 1928 imposition of a Roman alphabet, experts from the institute scoured rural Turkey to find examples of pure Turkish.
"It was an ironic thing, really," says historian Aykut Kansu, "a top-down imposition of a language of the people."
Prof Akalin's predecessors did their job well, achieving what some scholars dubbed "a catastrophic success". Thanks to the changes they instituted, even Ataturk's great speeches are sometimes not easily comprehensible to modern Turks.
As Eli Safak, perhaps the best-known of Turkey's younger generation of novelists, says: "We are a people who cannot read our own tombstones."
Yet while she thinks there's no turning back to the linguistic riches of Ottoman times, she also thinks the heyday of the language institute is a thing of the past.
"You can control written language via school textbooks and the like," she says. "But proverbs are a part of oral tradition, and oral tradition resists, always."