Was this actually news to anyone? How about David Foster Wallace? Shake A Spear wrote sitcoms.
Beliefs shape language. For instance, in the Christian moral ideal, you gain a sense of good vs evil. This dichotomy creates a divide. But things start to go into it to make it more dynamic. Up is where heaven is, down is where hell is. So we get sayings like "Are you feeling down?" White is good, black is bad. We ask people to stay in well lit areas, they follow the light to the afterlife. This also goes into how racism really began to take hold, at least one of the ways, not the only thing.
Yada, yada, yada.
I wonder about that ordering.
Maybe we feel "down" because when we're depressed or tired or whatever, we succumb more to gravity. And maybe we feel "up" because we're springy and standing tall when energized.
Or it could be a Mt Olympus thing (the gods are way up there where we can't reach!) that carried over, who knows.
We're probably going to play chicken and the egg with a lot of this.
Regardless, the belief is still the driving force on the language. Believe the gods are up high, and us lowly mortals are down here, Up and Down.
Dude in the video seems pretty enthused.
@JFD - But there's also "As above, so below."
