Free Languages In the World by Julie Tetel Andresen, Phillip M. Carter Page A

they arrange their products. It affects the ordering practices of their customers.
    The word douzaine was borrowed into Romanian, however only relatively recently, and it is not commonly used, although there is a phrase de duzină meaning ‘mediocre.’ It is found in the phrase un om de duzină , which means basically ‘a worthless person.’ Otherwise, the word is not found in any sayings, nor is it ever used as a number-group for things. It furthermore has no cultural relationship with the prices of bakery goods or with eggs, which in Romania come in cartons of either four or 10. As for the number of flowers one offers to a girlfriend or as a hostess gift, the number must always be odd, the reason being that in Romania even-numbered bouquets are only for the dead. 4 The point here is that the ‘same’ words dozen/duzină are not at all equivalent in different cultural contexts.
    Speaking of numbers, the Hispanic custom of the quinceañera  – the birthday celebrated when a girl turns 15, involving a mass, a special dress, and a party – is quite a bit more culturally salient in the communities where it is practiced than is the somewhat parallel North American notion of sweet 16 , which finds cultural currency mostly in songs or allusive use, such as in the movie title Sixteen Candles , and has no religious connection, such as including a church service. It could have been that 15 was chosen as the watershed year for North American girls, which might have produced the phrase fine 15 or fair 15 , but it wasn't. In any case, the key thing for English speakers is for the phrase to alliterate. The strong preference for alliteration in English can be traced back to poetic practices in Old English and is found in clichés and coupled words: busy as a bee , cool as a cucumber , hell in a handbasket , right as rain , wild and wooly , wrack and ruin . It even seems to be at work in the choice speakers make to use the shortened form of because : “I put my coat on, ‘cuz it's cold.” The phrase also sounds better that way, and speakers do like what they say to sound right. The idea here is that different cultures weave similar practices – here, a girl's coming of age – differently into cultural practices, just as linguistic differences may shape certain cultural notions.
    Cultural practices emerge and develop in particular settings, just as linguistic structures both support and are supported by cultural practices. In Australia, children in certain Aboriginal cultures play dead reckoning games they are not expected to solve correctly until age eight or so. In the English-speaking world, children aged four and five play the circle game Hokey-Pokey, where “You put your right hand in. You put your right hand out…”. As the children successively put in their left hand, right leg, left leg, and so on – with all the ensuing confusions and giggling – they are learning right from left. And, as the song says: “That's what it's all about.” The respective interactions of dead reckoning and right/left distinctions with regard to cultural practices illustrate the ways that language, culture, and cognition complement and shape one another.
    In this section, we have been speaking of contexts, specifically cultural contexts in microcorners of the English-speaking world versus Romania as well as Latin America versus North America. The study of how contexts influence the interpretations of meaning is called pragmatics . In a specific cultural context, one can study how variables such as time, place, social relationships, and a speaker's assumptions about the hearer's beliefs come into play. The moment one leaves the dynamics of one cultural context and moves to another is the moment one discovers how different can be words,phrases, syntactic possibilities, social relationships, and even the kinds of assumptions speakers make in relationship