Words, Shifty and Shifting Meanings

 What became of mortify?

While in prison, trying to fill in the holes of my literary education, I started wondering why some words no longer appeared.  The Victorians, as my memory recalls, would get mortified. This I did not notice so continuing far into the Twentieth Century.

mortification

noun

mor·​ti·​fi·​ca·​tion ˌmȯr-tə-fə-ˈkā-shən 

Synonyms of mortification

1

a

: a sense of humiliation and shame caused by something that wounds one's pride or self-respect

the mortification of being jilted by a little boarding-school girl—

Washington Irving

b

: the cause of such humiliation or shame

 Were people no longer feeling mortification?  I still have no answer. Watching Trump and JD Vance insult Zelensky left me feeling what I would call mortification.

If I am writing emotions, if words have gone by the way from our vocabularies, then how do have the language to describe all of our emotions? Another question for what I have no answer.

Reading James D. Reich's There’s a Word for That: Can language describe everything we feel—and should it? (Boston Review)

But what exactly is pleasurable about this? And what do we make of the converse feeling, equally common, that our linguistic maps, no matter how refined, always fall short of experience? Could these two pleasures—in naming our emotions and in realizing those names will always be inadequate—even be mutually reinforcing?

A recent book by Maria Heim, a professor of religion at Amherst College, provides some striking resources for examining these questions. Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India, is a collection of 177 different words for emotions from various South Asian languages, including Sanskrit, Pali, and a collection of dialects known together as Prakrit. And they come from a variety of different sources: Buddhist philosophy, meditation theory, literary theory, poetry, medical texts. Framed as a kind of glossary or word anthology—or, more precisely, following the classical South Asian metaphor Heim is drawing on, a “treasury” [kosha]—with micro-essays appended to each term, the book reveals a world of emotional arrangements that is by turns both familiar and deeply unfamiliar.

Yes, the book is not talking English. I do not think that matters; it should make us think about English, its unused, under-used, and non-existent words.

But for the purpose of interacting with that experience—to do anything to or with or through it, or to communicate it to someone else, this undivided totality is useless. It is only by dividing it up into parts (each of which can be named by a word) that I can start to determine things in my mind: that tree is getting old and should be cut down before it falls on the house; that car is driving dangerously and should be avoided; these people are getting bored of what I’m saying and I should hurry my story up. But these thoughts are still themselves rather inchoate, appearing in the mind as complete, unitary ideas. To communicate them to another person, I must break them up even further—into discrete spoken words that are uttered one by one. It is only then that I can tell someone “Cut down this tree but not that tree” or “Watch out for that car up ahead.”

But crucially, the person to whom I am speaking can only understand what I am trying to say if they do the converse: if they see past my individual words and have a sudden intuition of the more unified, coherent idea that I had in mind and was trying to communicate—an idea which was itself carved out of my holistic, gestalt experience of the entire situation.

Now, in my plain Midwestern prose there ought to be no use for such ideas. It's best use for me is pointing out what words do not convey, or what emotions go beyond our words.

You might also want to check out Human behavior is driven by fifteen key motives.

Using network analysis, the team searched for stable clusters in participants’ motivations. 

The result was a catalog of 15 core motives, organized into five larger categories:

• Environmental: Hoard, Create
• Physiological: Fear, Disgust, Hunger, Comfort
• Reproductive: Lust, Attract, Love, Nurture
• Psychological: Curiosity, Play
• Social: Affiliate, Status, Justice

How motives interact

While identifying motives was a crucial step, the researchers also explored how these motives functionally interact with each other. 

“For instance, the motives of Love and Nurture are positioned close to each other in the network, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, as caring for offspring enhances their chances of survival,” explained Albina Gallyamova, a junior research fellow at the HSE Center for Sociocultural Research.

By contrast, the motives Fear and Curiosity often appear in tension with each other: Fear protects against potential dangers but, when too strong, can suppress Curiosity – needed for innovation and knowledge.

How do our words for fear and curiosity act when they collide? There are emotions there, rolling and tumbling around, which will need to be described. 

All I can say, in the end, is to think about it.

sch 3/1