An insurance inspector's fire reports gave us the idea that language shapes thought

Benjamin Lee Whorf spent his career investigating industrial fires for an insurance company, and noticed workers smoked casually near 'empty' gasoline drums while treating full ones with care - even though the empty drums held explosive vapor and were the more dangerous of the two. Whorf argued the word 'empty' suggested inertness and lulled workers into carelessness, using the case to argue habitual language shapes perception - seeding what became linguistic relativity.

— Benjamin Lee Whorf (ed. John B. Carroll), The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language — Essay, 1939; collected in Language, Thought, and Reality, MIT Press, 1956
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