Language and feeling states

[Magical Realist]

I've been pondering the role of language in determining our awareness of our feelings and sensations. If I did not have a word like malaise to define for me the feeling before you get sick of being uncomfortable and uneasy, I probably would never have become aware of it. And there are subtle variations of emotional states that finding the right word helps to highlight. Like the peculiar half-pleasurable/half-painful sense of bittersweet. Or poignant. Or winsome. Or hangry. Or stircrazy. Words make conscious states or qualities we would not normally even notice. There are even symptoms of illness and side effects of medications that if we can't find the right words to describe will not be taken seriously by our doctor. The assumption being that if it's too vague to be described then it isn't serious. Which in fact is not true. Our emotional landscape is only as detailed as our vocabulary allows to be. With someone like a poet, wholly new feelings and moods may be captured adding to the overall richness of what it means to be human. Become a poet of your own condition. Endeavor to find the adjectives and metaphors that communicate your inner private being to the world. There is a lot more to your experience than meets the eye.

[C C]

[...] There are even symptoms of illness and side effects of medications that if we can't find the right words to describe will not be taken seriously by our doctor. The assumption being that if it's too vague to be described then it isn't serious. [...]

Kind of along the line of what Wilfrid Sellars stressed, that one may first need a concept of _X_ just to discern, identify, and understand _X_. But invented words / language which lack direct association with concrete objects can find utility and influence upon the world, too. The approaches of science weren't found under a rock somewhere -- a "plan for operation" is intellectual / linguistic rather than a corporeal item that Clyde tripped over while walking in the backyard.

This article seemed a rather superficial essay at first glance, but the germ of its idea is worth saving. It's also why mathematics recruited as a "perfect language" by science fails to capture so much in its formulations. The abstract and precise-meaning symbols had the specific, phenomenal content stripped from the ancestral provenances. Leaving only the quantitative / measurement characteristics or what seemed universal (treated as superior truth) rather than contingent (treated as inferior).

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