Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Hotheads | 367allows new coinages to become epidemic. When a language has not hadthese stimulants, people describe how they feel with circumlocutions,metaphors, metonyms, and synecdoches. When a Tahitian woman says,"My husband died and I feel sick," her emotional state is hardly mysterious;we can bet she is not complaining about acid indigestion. Even alanguage with a copious vocabulary has words for only a fraction of emotionalexperience. The author G. K. Chesterton wrote,Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless,and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest; . . . Yethe seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all theirtones and semitones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately representedby an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that anordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own insidenoises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies ofdesire.When English-speakers hear the word Schadenfreude for the firsttime, their reaction is not, "Let me see . . . Pleasure in another's misfortunes. . . What could that possibly be? I cannot grasp the concept; mylanguage and culture have not provided me with such a category." Theirreaction is, 'You mean there's a word for it? Cool!" That is surely whatwent through the minds of the writers who introduced Schadenfreudeinto written English a century ago. New emotion words catch onquickly, without tortuous definitions; they come from other languages(ennui, angst, naches, amok), from subcultures such as those of musiciansand drug addicts (blues, funk, juiced, wasted, rush, high, freakedout), and from general slang (pissed, bummed, grossed out, blown away). Ihave never heard a foreign emotion word whose meaning was notinstantly recognizable.People's emotions are so alike that it takes a philosopher to craft agenuinely alien one. In an essay called "Mad Pain and Martian Pain,"David Lewis defines mad pain as follows:There might be a strange man who sometimes feels pain, just as we do,but whose pain differs greatly from ours in its causes and effects. Ourpain is typically caused by cuts, burns, pressure, and the like; his iscaused by moderate exercise on an empty stomach. Our pain is generallydistracting; his turns his mind to mathematics, facilitating concentrationon that but distracting him from anything else. Intense pain has no ten-