As we were putting finishing touches on this volume, the news broke that Flight 1549 crashed in the Hudson River, New York. Our attention was instantly diverted by an outpouring of online and offline news reports and commentaries to the breath-taking drama that had unfolded, in particular, the pilot's miraculous landing of the aircraft on the river, saving 154 lives. As we glanced over the reports, our eyes halted on the following lines and the similar wording:

Piqued by our interest in linguistic relativity, we turned to El País, a Spanish newspaper, and found several descriptions, and much as expected, none with the level of detail with respect to manner of motion or with such elaborate and compact path description as the above (see italics). The Spanish descriptions tend to contain a greater number of path verbs than manner verbs and abound in static descriptions of the scene rather than descriptions of the trajectories per se. The two paragraphs below illustrate these tendencies. The first paragraph includes several path verbs (dirigirse 'head', volver 'return', amerizar 'land on water') and one cause-of-motion verb (evacuar 'evacuate'), with manner information provided only by means of the periphrastic construction quedó flotando 'remained floating'. The second paragraph illustrates the tendency to provide static descriptions: