This talk by psychologist & linguist Steven Pinker dives into the arcane dimension of language as a window into Human nature.
For Pinker, the brilliance of the mind lies in the way it uses just two processes to turn the finite building blocks of our language into infinite meanings. The first is metaphor: we take a concrete idea and use it as a stand-in for abstract thoughts. The second is combination: we combine ideas according to rules, like the syntactic rules of language, to create new thoughts out of old ones.
The video is 1 hour long, but it is particularly relevant to NLPers as Pinker goes into much of what we study especially at the master Practitioner level; for example, he talks about the concept of time and how it is revealed in language at the beginning of the video, this will remind you of the use of language in Quantum Linguistic. He studies the use of metaphor, including in swearing (so if you are easily offended, do not watch this video).
Note – This video contains strong language.